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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE BROSS LIBRARY 

VOLUME X 



THE BROSS LIBRARY 



THE BIBLE; ITS ORIGIN AND NATURE 

Rev. Marcus Dods, D.D. 

THE BIBLE OF NATURE. J. Arthur Thomson, M.A. 

THE RELIGIONS OF MODERN SYRIA AND 

PALESTINE. Frederick J. Bliss. Ph.D. 

THE SOURCES OF RELIGIOUS INSIGHT 

Josiah Royce 

THE WILL TO FREEDOM, or the Gospel of 
Nietsche and the Gospel of Christ 

Rev. John Neville Figgis, D.D. 

FAITH JUSTIFIED BY PROGRESS 

H. W. Wright, Ph.D. 
BIBLE AND SPADE 

John P. Peters, Ph.D., Sc.D., D.D. 

BROSS PRIZE VOLUMES 

THE PROBLEM OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 

James Orr, D.D. 

THE MYTHICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE 
GOSPELS. Rev. Thomas James Thorburn, D.D. 



THE BROSS LECTURES . . 19»l 



BIBLE AND SPADE 



LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE 

LAKE FOREST COLLEGE 

ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE LATE 

WILLIAM BROSS 



BY 

REV. JOHN P. PETERS, Ph.D., Sc.D., D.D. 

RECTOR EMERITUS OP ST. MICHAEL'S CHURCH, NEW YORK, PROFESSOR OP 

NEW TESTAMENT LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE IN 

THE UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
NEW YORK .... 1922 




Copyright, 1922, by 
THE TRUSTEES OF LAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY 



Published January, 1922 



PRINTED AT 

THE SCRIBNER PRESS 

NEW YORK, U. S. A. 



JAN 30 1922 

©CI.A654459 






JK ■,. 






I/O 



THE BROSS FOUNDATION 

The Bross Lectures are an outgrowth of a fund es- 
tablished in 1879 by the late William Bross, Lieutenant- 
Governor of Illinois from 1866 to 1870. Desiring some 
memorial of his son, Nathaniel Bross, who died in 
1856, Mr. Bross entered into an agreement with the 
"Trustees of Lake Forest University/' whereby there 
was finally transferred to them the sum of forty thou- 
sand dollars, the income of which was to accumulate 
in perpetuity for successive periods of ten years, the 
accumulations of one decade to be spent in the follow- 
ing decade, for the purpose of stimulating the best 
books or treatises "on the connection, relation, and 
mutual bearing of any practical science, the history of 
our race, or the facts in any department of knowledge, 
with and upon the Christian Religion." The object 
of the donor was to "call out the best efforts of the 
highest talent and the ripest scholarship of the world 
to illustrate from science, or from any department of 
knowledge, and to demonstrate the divine origin and 
the authority of the Christian Scriptures; and, further, 
to show how both science and revelation coincide and 
prove the existence, the providence, or any or all of 
the attributes of the only living and true God, 'infinite, 
eternal, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, 
holiness, justice, goodness, and truth/" 



/ 



7 



vi The Bross Foundation 

The gift contemplated in the original agreement of 
1879 was finally consummated in 1890. The first 
decade of the accumulation of interest having closed 
in 1900, the Trustees of the Bross Fund began at this 
time to carry out the provisions of the deed of gift. 
It was determined to give the general title of "The 
Bross Library" to the series of books purchased and 
published with the proceeds of the Bross Fund. In 
accordance with the express wish of the donor, that 
the "Evidences of Christianity" of his "very dear 
friend and teacher, Mark Hopkins, D.D.," be pur- 
chased and "ever numbered and known as No. 1 of 
the series," the Trustees secured the copyright of this 
work, which has been republished in a presentation 
edition as Volume I of the Bross Library. 

The trust agreement prescribed two methods by 
which the production of books and treatises of the na- 
ture contemplated by the donor was to be stimulated: 

1. The Trustees were empowered to offer one or 
more prizes during each decade, the competition for 
which was to be thrown open to "the scientific men, 
the Christian philosophers and historians of all na- 
tions." In accordance with this provision, a prize of 
$6,000 was offered in 1902 for the best book fulfilling 
the conditions of the deed of gift, the competing manu- 
scripts to be presented on or before June 1, 1905. The 
prize was awarded to the Reverend James Orr, D.D., 
Professor of Apologetics and Systematic Theology in 
the United Free Church College, Glasgow, for his 
treatise on "The Problem of the Old Testament," 
which was published in 1906 as Volume III of the Bross 



The Bross Foundation vii 

Library. The second decennial prize of $6,000 was 
awarded in 1915 to the Reverend Thomas James 
Thorburn, D.D., LL.D., Hastings, England, for his 
book entitled "The Mythical Interpretation of the 
Gospels/' which has been published as Volume VII of 
the Bross Library. The announcement of the condi- 
tions may be obtained from the President of Lake 
Forest College. 

2. The Trustees were also empowered to " select and 
designate any particular scientific man or Christian 
philosopher and the subject on which he shall write," 
and to "agree with him as to the sum he shall receive 
for the book or treatise to be written." Under this 
provision the Trustees have, from time to time, invited 
eminent scholars to deliver courses of lectures before 
Lake Forest College, such courses to be subsequently 
published as volumes in the Bross Library. The first 
course of lectures, on "Obligatory Morality," was de- 
livered in May, 1903, by the Reverend Francis Landey 
Patton, D.D., LL.D., President of Princeton Theologi- 
cal Seminary. The copyright of the lectures is now 
the property of the Trustees of the Bross Fund. The 
second course of lectures, on "The Bible: Its Origin 
and Nature," was delivered in May, 1904, by the 
Reverend Marcus Dods, D.D., Professor of Exegetical 
Theology in New College, Edinburgh. These lectures 
w r ere published in 1905 as Volume II of the Bross Li- 
brary. The third course of lectures, on "The Bible of 
Nature," was delivered in September and October, 1907, 
by Mr. J. Arthur Thomson, M.A., Regius Professor of 
Natural History in the University of Aberdeen. These 



.-.-• 



viii The Bross Foundation 

lectures were published in 1908 as Volume IV of the 
Bross Library. The fourth course of lectures, on "The 
Religions of Modern Syria and Palestine," was delivered 
in November and December, 1908, by Frederick Jones 
Bliss, Ph.D., of Beirut, Syria. These lectures are pub- 
lished as Volume V of the Bross Library. The fifth 
course of lectures, on "The Sources of Religious In- 
sight," was delivered November 13 to 19, 1911, by 
Professor Josiah Royce, Ph.D., of Harvard University. 
These lectures are embodied in the sixth volume. 
Volume VII, "The Mythical Interpretation of the 
Gospels," by the Reverend Thomas James Thorburn, 
D.D., was published in 1915. The seventh course of 
lectures, on "The Will to Freedom," was delivered in 
May, 1915, by the Reverend John Neville Figgis, D.D., 
LL.D., of the House of the Resurrection, Mirfield, 
England, and published as Volume VIII of the series. 
In 1916, Professor Henry Wilkes Wright, of Lake 
Forest College, delivered the next course of lectures on 
"Faith Justified by Progress." These lectures are em- 
bodied in Volume IX. The present volume is com- 
prised of the lectures delivered April 4 to 9, 1921, by 
the Reverend John P. Peters, Ph.D., of Sewanee, 
Tennessee. 

HERBERT McCOMB MOORE, 
President of Lake Forest University. 

Lake Forest, Illinois, 
November, 1921. 



SUMMARY OF CONTENTS 



THE ANCESTRY OF THE HEBREWS 

PAGE 

Benjamin Franklin and the Book of Ruth — Revolt against 
the Bible as taught — Present reaction toward traditional 
views — Truth for truth's sake — Genesis, a treasure-house 
of ancient lore — First volume of Genesis — In seven chap- 
ters equalling the seven days of creation — The second 
volume — Five chapters — Twelve, the total number, equals 
the twelve tribes — Arabian theory of Semitic origins — 
Contradicted by linguistics — The Semitic world in the 
fourth millennium B. C. — The Sumerians of southern 
Babylonia — Semites from the north conquer and Semitize 
Babylonia — Semites supplant troglodytes in Palestine, 
2500 B. C— First Indo-European invasion — The horse 
and the Hyksos — Egyptian conquest of Palestine and 
Syria — Tel el-Ainarna tablets — Civilized lands of the 
copper age — Relation of Palestine to Egypt — Egyptian 
tomb at Shechem — Mosaism and Egypt — The great Hit- 
tite invasion — First appearances of the Hebrews, an 
Aramaean stock — Ikhnaton the reformer — Abd-Khiba, 
king of Jerusalem — The treaty with the Hittites — 
Pharaoh of the oppression — First mention of Israel — 
Israelite tradition of the date of the Exodus — Ancient 
Hebrew and Babylonian method of dating — Inroads of 
barbarians and the downfall of the empires — The Israelite 
occupation of Canaan — Armenia, home-land of the Ara- 
maeans — Their downward movement traced from in- 
scriptions — Ethnological identification of Armenian and 
Aramaean . ' . 1-47 



x Summary of Contents 

II 

COSMOGONY AND FOLK-LORE 

PAGE 

Discovery of Flood story in Assyria — Babylonianisms — 
Error of translation in Genesis I. — The evidence of natural 
history — Missionaries solve the problem — Word of God — 
Brings a world out of chaos — Cosmogony of Genesis — 
Other Hebrew forms — Compared with Babylonian cos- 
mogonies — Eden and the Temptation — The sex element 
— Babylonian sex liturgies — Hebrew revolt against las- 
civious cult — Antediluvian heroes — Hebrew and Baby- 
lonian common good — The plain of Shinar — The tower of 
Babel — Where was it? — The ruins of Borsippa — An in- 
scription of Nebuchadrezzar — The ziggurat of Borsippa 
— Abraham and Amraphel — The laws of Hammurapi — 
Analysis of those laws — Comparison with the Hebrew — 
Sarah and Hagar — Rahab, the tavern-keeper — Hammu- 
rapi' s laws and Alfred's Dooms — The relation of Hammu- 
rapi's laws to Hebrew legislation 48-92 

III 

HISTORY AND PROPHECY 

Egyptian travel story of the time of the Judges — Introduc- 
tion of iron — Invention of the alphabet — Beginning of the 
Hebrew records — Parallel with Europe — David's kingdom 
— The origin and original form of the name of the God of 
the Jews, Yahaweh — Solomon's temple and its resem- 
blance in principle to Babylonian temples — The Nethinim 
or temple servants — Light on the policies of Ahab, Jehu, 
and Jeroboam — Discovery of some of the lost ten tribes 
— Sennacherib's inscriptions — Merodach Baladan and 
Hezekiah — The Assyrian disaster and its confirmation of 
the Messianic hope — Sennacherib's destruction of Babylon 
and Isaiah's prophecy of the Day of Yahaweh based 
thereon — The three volumes of Isaiah — The Tammuz cult 
in Babylonia and the prophecies of Isaiah — The Tam- 
muz-Adonis ritual, its origin and meaning — Jeremiah's 



Summary of Contents xi 

PAGE 

purchase of the property of his cousin Hanameel — First 
discovery of the use of clay contract tablets among the 
Jews — Discovery of clay tablets in Palestine — The book 
of Daniel and the Babylonian records — Nebuchadrezzar 
and Belshazzar — Cyrus and Darius — Use of folk-lore in 
the book of Daniel — The true value of Daniel . . 93-131 



IV 

HEBREW PSALMODY 

Bad tendencies of recent Psalm criticism — Psalms are litur- 
gies, not odes of a court poet — Ancient liturgical use of 
Poor and Needy — Copying, adaptation and preservation 
of old Babylonian liturgies — Evidence from 88th Psalm 
of similar practices among the Hebrews — Parallelism the 
essential feature of both Babylonian and Hebrew poetry 
— Similar ritual uses and liturgical formulae in Hebrew 
and Babylonian Psalms — Similarity in Psalm titles and 
musical accompaniments — The place of sacrifice — Two 
penitentials compared — Messianic king, deified king — 
Relation of Hebrew to Babylonian psalmody — David and 
the Psalter of the Jerusalem temple — Local notes in Psalm 
collections — The Pilgrim Psalter — The Psalm Book of 
Dan — The impregnable fortress of Sion — Adaptation of a 
Korahite Psalm for use by the Jerusalem choir — Mis- 
understanding of rubrics — A processional liturgy for a 
royal sacrifice at Jerusalem 132-167 



THE EXPLORATION OF PALESTINE 

Begun by Americans, Robinson and Smith — Lynch's explora- 
tion of the Dead Sea — Organization of the English Pales- 
tine Exploration Fund — Warren's excavations at Jeru- 
salem — The survey of Palestine — Surface finds — Egyptian 
inscriptions — The Moabite stone — The Silwan inscription 
— Its further history — The temple barrier inscription — 
Inscription of the priestly tomb — Inscription of the syna- 



xii Summary of Contents 

PAGE 

gogue of the Libertines — Renewal of excavations — 
Lachish and the first clay tablet — The south wall of Jeru- 
salem — Bliss's excavations in the Shephielah — The painted 
tombs of Marissa — Excavation of Gezer — The Canaanite 
sanctuary and its abominations — The rock-cut water 
tunnel — The pool and tunnel at Gibeon — General results 
of the excavations at Gezer — Beth Shemesh — Sellin's ex- 
cavations at Taanach, Jericho and Shechem — More tablets 
— German excavations at Megiddo — An Israelite inscrip- 
tion and an Israelite temple — American excavations at 
Samaria — Palace of Ahab — The synagogue at Capernaum 
— House of Caiaphas and ancient stair street — Excava- 
tions in David's City — Collections of antiquities and sum- 
mary of results — Underground Jerusalem — Sites identified 
— The tomb — Golgotha — The Prsetorium — Gethsemane — 
House of the Last Supper — Elsewhere in Palestine — 
Nazareth — Shechem — Present prospects and present 
agencies — The American school — The American oppor- 
tunity 168-203 

VI 

NEW TESTAMENT TIMES 

Prevalence of magic among the Jews — Sumerian magic, the 
ban and the atonement — The corresponding Jewish use — 
The principle of exorcism — The word of power and the use 
of the name — Sympathetic magic and the swine — Credal 
and sacramental charms — Egyptian magical and romantic 
stories — Egyptian side lights, Amarna, Jeb and Oxyrhyn- 
cus — Dictionary and grammar revolutionized — The home 
view of the outer world — Every-day life under Roman rule 
— A libellus illustrating Rev. 13 — Slaves and freedmen — 
Domestic and family life — Expose the girl— Publicans, 
taxes and graft — The sayings of Jesus — The Gospel ac- 
cording to the Hebrews — St. Luke and the inscriptions — 
New realism in the Gospels — The steps on which Jesus trod 
— The praetorium and the gambling soldiers — The Place 
of the Skull and the Tomb— The Parable of the Vine— The 
"High Priest Prayer" 204-239 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

Jacob's Pillar 24 

Jacob's Pillar from below 28 

Synagogue of the Hasidim on western hill of Jerusalem . 150 

Present-day view of the Temple courts looking down from 
the western hill 154 

Spring of Robinson's Arch 160 

The pool of Silwan (Siloam), which the leader was to en- 
circle 162 

From rampart to rampart, Psalms 84 : 7 164 

Recent Jewish excavations 166 

Khebur Israim, Tomb of Israel ( ?) 180 

Rock-cut pool and secret water passage beneath Gibeon . 184 

Frank Mountain, an artificial mountain a few miles south- 
east of Bethlehem, built by Herod for his tomb . .188 

Pillars of the Basilica at Sebaste, the Herodian-Roman city 
built on the site of the ancient Samaria 192 

Threshing floor over cave on Mount Gerizzim, where the 
Samaritan takes off his shoes . 200 

Enclosing wall of old Temple area in Jerusalem . . . .214 

Ruins of a white marble synagogue at Capernaum . . . 232 

House of the wicked husbandmen 234 



THE ANCESTRY OF THE HEBREWS 

Every one is familiar, I suppose, with the story of 
Franklin and the book of Ruth. Intellectual Paris 
had cast aside the Bible; to read it or to quote it marked 
a man an ignoramus. On the other hand the intel- 
lectuals had gone mad over the ancient writings of 
all other races and religions than the Christians and 
their Hebrew forebears. It was the fashion to praise 
and bewonder the beauty, the spirituality, the pro- 
fundity of such writings, and happy he who could dis- 
cover some new treasure from the Orient. Franklin 
belonged to a clique or club at the height of this fash- 
ion, where each member in turn came prepared to 
point out or to discuss some new bit of wit or wisdom 
he felt himself to have discovered in an ancient writ- 
ing, or, if very fortunate, to present and interpret some 
hitherto unheard-of newly found record, saying, verse, 
or even perchance book or treatise from the East, but 
none mentioned or made intelligent allusion to the 
Bible. Came Franklin's turn, he engaged an actress 
to learn and recite the book of Ruth, and took her with 
him to the meeting, explaining that having found an 
ancient Oriental idyl, which he thought to be unknown 
in Paris, or certainly known but to very few, he had 

brought a translation of the same to lay before them, 

1 



2 Bible and Spade 

and to do full justice to its singular beauty had engaged 
this lady, well known to all, to learn and recite it. 

All were moved by the pathos, the naivete, the en- 
gaging charm, and the spirituality of the idyl, which 
they wondered they had never met nor heard of be- 
fore; and when they had abundantly expressed them- 
selves to that effect, Franklin informed them that it 
was from the despised Bible, well known to all Chris- 
tian ignoramuses, in which book, if they would look, 
they would find much more and better. 

This revolt against the Bible was due to its abuse 
by men who professed belief in its inspiration. They 
had made that belief a bar to progress by treating the 
Bible as a repository of all knowledge, a revelation of 
all truth, infallible in each jot and tittle. But so, 
they had locked up the book itself, made it a mystery 
and confined its interpretation to initiates only, putting 
anathema on its free handling. No wonder the French 
emancipators counted it a relic of barbarism and su- 
perstition, and cast it into limbo, as blind to its sur- 
passing beauty as new-made upstarts to the grace and 
glory of true art. 

Within the memory of us older men a complete 
change has taken place in the theory and practice of 
history and the evaluation of historical documents. 
Partly this is due to the application of the doctrine of 
evolution to history, as to every other field of human 
knowledge. Partly it is due to increase of knowledge 
in all fields. This made the children unwilling to 
accept without question the conclusions and the tradi- 
tions of the fathers. They must for themselves exam- 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 3 

ine all things in the light of their knowledge. The 
first result was the upsetting of much supposed to be 
established, the rejection of an immense amount of 
tradition, and the development of an enormous scepti- 
cism in reference to everything old. The early his- 
tory of Rome, Greece, and Israel was but a mass of 
religious myths and fables, or national and tribal 
legends. The ancient literature was relatively mod- 
ern, or at least had been so worked over and changed 
by later hands that it could not for historical purposes 
be counted ancient. This scepticism manifested it- 
self especially in the study of Hebrew and early Chris- 
tian literature as contained in the Bible for the same 
reason which moved emancipated Frenchmen of 
Franklin's time to cast the Bible into limbo. Every 
tradition of date or authority of Bible books came un- 
der suspicion. The Pauline authorship of almost all 
of the Epistles was denied, the Gospel tradition of 
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John rejected, and most 
of the books of the New Testament assigned to the 
second century after Christ. Similarly in the Old 
Testament practically every book was resolved into 
a great variety of documents, and as a whole almost 
all of them were assigned to dates below the Exile, 
and onward into the second pre-Christian century, 
and it was impossible to reconstruct from them re- 
liable ancient history. This affected seriously foun- 
dation facts as well as documents. The Decalogue 
postdated Moses by centuries, and then Moses van- 
ished altogether; others proved that Jesus was not 
born at Bethlehem, and some showed him in fact a 



4 Bible and Spade 

mythical figure. And remember that in general these 
scholars were not " enemies of the Bible," as certain 
of their theological opponents designated them, but 
earnest and devout students of the Scriptures. Their 
attitude was a reaction against that theological tradi- 
tion of interpretation which seemed to them, not only 
antiquated, but also pernicious and untruthful. 

When I began to study ancient history, ancient 
meant a period about 500 B. C. Practically there 
was nothing known beyond that date. Earlier stories, 
as in Livy and Virgil, Homer and the Old Testament, 
contained no history which could be called such. 
Within my memory the situation has changed pro- 
foundly. Partly archaeologists and antiquarians have 
unearthed and discovered objects and writings of all 
possible ages, which have furnished the material to 
test, correct, and supplement the literature that has 
come down to us. This has carried back our knowledge 
of the history of civilization almost as many thousand 
years before Christ as before we reckoned hundreds. 
In the same period there has developed that entire 
discipline of comparative science (comparative lin- 
guistics, religion, folk-lore, games, and everything else), 
a result of the rapid enlargement of our information 
and our outlook, which has enabled us to evaluate 
and utilize for historical purposes much previously 
known literary material, like Homer and the book of 
Genesis. There has set in also the natural reaction 
against the extreme attitude of iconoclasm and re- 
bellion resulting from the children's discovery that all 
the fathers had handed down was not true. The chil- 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 5 

dren having grown older are feeling differently about 
the knowledge and the traditions of the fathers, and 
in Bible study there is, at the present moment, a strong 
current, almost threatening to become a flood, toward 
the rehabilitation of older views. So in the New 
Testament within the last few years leading critical 
scholars have reaffirmed the older views of date and 
authorship of the Gospels, Acts and Epistles almost 
unchanged; and in the Old Testament critical views of 
composition, authorship, and date of books and docu- 
ments, which had come to be accepted by most modern 
scholars as final, are being rudely questioned. This 
does not mean that the old traditional views of the 
contents of the documents recorded in them are al- 
together correct. It means that we have been finding, 
not only that those Bible documents are of the greatest 
value as historical records, but that the traditions 
incrusting them have an historical importance which 
had been overlooked. By means of the Bible, studied 
with its traditions, plus the spade, we are now restor- 
ing the very ancient history in a rather wonderful 
way. 

We shall not, however, get the best results until 
we stop talking or thinking about defending the Bible, 
and devote ourselves wholly and unreservedly and 
without any arriere pensee, in Bible study as all other 
study, to the search after truth for truth's sake. I 
am not concerned in these lectures to support the 
Bible record by the results of archaeological research, 
I am concerned to find points where the written docu- 
ments of the Bible and archaeological discoveries throw 



6 Bible and Spade 

— . « 

light one upon the other, either giving us two wit- 
nesses to a fact, or the one explaining the other. 

Genesis is a perfect treasure-house of ancient lore 
of the Hebrew forebears, and of the land of Canaan, 
and is the most important document in existence for 
the ancient history of hither Asia. But before we con- 
sider its contents let us examine its outward form. 
The verse division, which is old and of Hebrew origin, 
and the chapter division, which is Christian and medi- 
aeval, are convenient for purposes of reference, but 
they often obscure the sense. The theological readers 
of the Bible, who have tended to make Genesis part of 
a great dictionary of texts, and the critical scholars, 
who have tended to make it an anatomical laboratory, 
both alike disregarding its literary form and struc- 
ture, have failed to observe how it was put together 
by its Hebrew editor, or to regard its character and 
purpose as he puts them before us. 

Genesis consists of two parts or volumes, correspond- 
ing in character to the parts in the Egyptian, Baby- 
lonian, and Phoenician histories of those countries as 
they have come down to us through the Greeks. The 
first part of those histories deals with the mythical 
beginnings, in which gods and demigods play the 
leading role. Ages are enormous, reckoned by hun- 
dreds, thousands, and tens of thousands, and it took 
untold seons to disengage man and man's earth from 
their entanglement with deity and deity's abode. The 
second part of each of these histories is human, a sane 
and sober story of dynasties of men, their achieve- 
ments, and the development and growth of peoples. 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 7 

In Genesis the first volume, the first eleven chapters, 
deals with the time when God, having created the 
world, walked and talked with men, and they with 
Him; deity and man intermarried; man struggled with 
and even endangered the position of God; and as 
mythical and semidivine heroes the span of men's 
lives was enormous. This first part of the volume of 
Genesis is divided into seven sections (Hebrew chap- 
ters) by the recurring phrase: These are the generations, 
or This is the book of generations, only the first chapter 
being without this heading, because in the nature of 
things it does not require it. This (1 : 1-2 : 3) is the 
chapter t>f creation: "In the beginning God created 
the heavens and the earth." 

The second chapter begins: "These are the genera- 
tions of the heavens and the earth" (Gen. 2:4-4). 
This is often spoken of as a duplicate of the account of 
creation contained in chapter 1. It does in fact over- 
lap and duplicate that account to a small extent, and 
it is clearly derived from a different source, but it is 
not the chapter of creation, but the chapter of the 
preparation. The earth and the heavens having been 
created, earth is prepared for the dwelling-place of 
man, and a garden of delight set at the sources of the 
Tigris and Euphrates, for there man had his origin. 
All beasts are formed and made subject to man, for 
he knows and gives them their names, but with none 
of these can he mate; so out of his very bones and 
flesh is a helpmeet made for him, and theirs is all in 
the garden. But with sex comes sin. They lose Eden, 
and then begins for the human race a life of toil and 



8 Bible and Spade 

child-bearing, of strife and envy and murder, out of 
which came the knowledge of proper city building, 
metallurgy, poetry, and music. 

The third chapter (5:1-6: 8) is headed: "The book 
of the generations of Adam," i. e., the human race; a 
list of names of prehistoric ancestors who reigned for 
seons, and with whose daughters the gods cohabited, 
producing strange beings and provoking God at last 
to blot out that evil generation, preserving the one 
just man, Noah, the last of the primal heroes. The 
fourth chapter (6:9-9:28), entitled "The Genera- 
tions of Noah," tells the story of the flood which de- 
stroyed the old Adam brood, of a rebirth, as it were, of 
the human race in the mountains of Armenia, at or 
near the place of Adam's origin, of the establishment 
of religion, with proper sacrifice, and of husbandry. 

With the fifth chapter (10 : 1-11 : 9) we come to the 
"Generations of the Sons of Noah," Shem, Ham, and 
Japheth, the repeopling of the earth by this new human 
race, and the division of men into peoples, races, and 
languages. It is a review of the nations and peoples 
in the Hebrew horizon, not primarily ethnological. 
Japheth is the Medes to the east, and the Scythian 
hordes to the northeast, and certain people of central, 
northern and western Asia Minor and of the north- 
ern coasts and islands of the iEgean and Mediter- 
ranean, to a considerable extent but by no means en- 
tirely Indo-European. These are the peoples of the 
north. Ham is in no sense an ethnological group. 
It comprises Ethiopia, Egypt, and northern Africa, 
Arabia, Sumerian Babylonia, and the Canaanites, 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 9 

including all the non-Aramaean peoples In Palestine, 
among them Phoenicians and Amorites who were 
Semitic, Hittites who were Indo-European, and Phil- 
istines. These are the peoples of the South. Between 
the Hebrew and all these Canaanites there was bitter- 
ness and a curse. The eldest son, whose home is nat- 
urally in the centre, Armenia, southern Asia Minor, 
and Mesopotamia, is Shem, the father of the Hebrews, 
of the Assyrians, and above all of the Aramaeans. 1 It 
is this stock to which Israel belongs, and in the history 
of which the author of Genesis is concerned, and so 
the sixth chapter, Gen. 11:10-26, is "The Genera- 
tions of Shem," a race genealogy. But among the 
Semites it is the Aramaean stock which our author de- 
sires to follow, because to that division of the Semites 
Israel belongs. So the concluding chapter of the first 
volume of Genesis (11 : 27-32) is headed "The Genera- 
tions of Terah." 

Notice that these chapters number in all seven, the 
mystical number of the days of creation with which 
the volume began. The author has drawn his material 
from various sources, some earlier, some later, but he 
has so selected and combined it as to form a continuous 
narrative cunningly contrived to expound and to fix 
in the mind his grand theory of God's plan for Israel. 

The second volume, from Gen. 12 onward, is ar- 
ranged in the same way, each section or chapter headed, 
as before: "The Generations of ," except that, as 

1 The curious inclusion of Elam in this group, if the text be 
correct, may be political, a reflection of the relations existing 
between Elam and Babylonia. 



10 Bible and Spade 

in the first volume, the first chapter (12 : 1-25 : 12) re- 
quires and has no heading. In this volume, however, 
the manner is different. We are on terra firma, deal- 
ing with familiar territory, with a wealth of human 
tradition and folk-lore to draw from. This chapter 
tells, under the name of Abram or Abraham the great 
hero of Hebron, the story of the coming into Canaan 
of the Israelites, an Aramaean clan from Mesopotamia, 
whose great shrine of Sin, the moon-god, at Haran is 
parented from the shrine of Sin at Ur in southern Baby- 
lonia, Sinai thus being brought into connection with 
both. Into this is woven some later history, as of the 
descent into Egypt, and the deliverance from the Egyp- 
tians by God's intervention, 1 and of the struggles 
with the Philistines. 2 It reflects also the relations of 
Palestine with Babylonia in the pre-Egyptian period. 8 
This chapter also sets forth the fact that the neighbor- 
ing nations, Moab and Amnion, 4 are of the same He- 
brew-Aramaean stock, children of Haran, but earlier 
settled and separated from that stock. The second 
chapter of this volume (25 : 12-18) is entitled: "These 
are the Generations of Ishmael," and informs us that 
the nomadic or seminomadic tribes to the south and 
southeast of Palestine, stretching from the Egyptian 
border into northern Arabia, were of the same Aramaean 
stock as Israel, and that with them Israel has a later 
connection, and therefore a closer kinship, than it 
had with Moab and Ammon. Like Israel, they have 
the twelvefold tribal division. They are, however, 

1 Gen. 12 : 10-20. * Gen. 20. 

8 Gen. 14. * Gen. 13. 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 11 

older by birth, i. e., in longer possession of their land 
than Israel. But this line leads nowhither, hence the 
brevity of this chapter, and we turn back in the third 
chapter (25:19-35:29), "The Generations of Isaac," 
to follow the legitimate line of Israel's ancestry through 
the younger son. Still, however, we are in close touch 
with the region of the Ishmaelite, for Isaac was the 
legendary hero of Beersheba, and until late in Israel's 
history Beersheba was a great pilgrimage sanctuary, 
especially of the simon-pure Israelites of the northern 
kingdom, and the Fear of Isaac was a common name 
for the deity. In the story of the wife that is brought 
for Isaac from Haran, than which there is no more 
beautiful specimen of the raconteur's art in all litera- 
ture, is set forth the continued close relation of Israel, 
in contrast to the neighboring peoples, with the great 
Aramaean centre in Mesopotamia and the continued 
influx of migrant tribes from that region. Isaac's 
chapter is not, however, of such varied interest from 
the historical standpoint as Abraham's. It pictures 
more the conditions of the negeb, or south country, 
the digging and fighting for water in the desert border- 
land. Like Abraham's chapter, this also weaves into 
the more ancient traditions and legends reflections of 
later conditions, and especially of the struggle for the 
possession of the land between Hebrews and Philis- 
tines. 1 

The fourth chapter (36), "The Generations of 
Esau," is, like the second, a false lead, as it were; 
it goes nowhither. Edom was Israel's elder brother. 

i Gen. 26 : 1-33. 



12 Bible and Spade 

He became a settled state adopting the Canaanite 
civilization (Canaanite marriages), while Israel, the 
younger brother, was still a nomad. Esau's state lay 
in that southern region which Israel always claimed as 
his home and the home of his God, Horeb and Sinai; 
and part of this Edomite civilization also was Amalek. 
Here the author found historical records as well as 
folk-lore at hand, and is able to give us lists of kings 
and chiefs. Indeed he had two documents for Edom 
before him, 1 and has given us duplicate generations of 
Esau (36:9-14 and 36: 15-19), precisely as you find 
duplicates in the heraldic visitations of English coun- 
ties, which, as you cannot harmonize, you juxtapose. 
But as this line leads nowhither for his purpose, hav- 
ing established and noted the peculiarly close relation 
of Israel with Edom, our author goes back to the story 
of Israel's descent as younger son, called by the grace 
of God to hazard and adventure, and so to greater 
achievement and better possession. It is almost as 
though one were reading the story of American ances- 
tors in the records of English parishes and counties, 
the younger son moving from a south Devon village 
to a north Devon town, and his younger son from there 
to Bristol, and still another younger son from there to 
America, economic pressure, the spirit of adventure, 
and religious motives combining to carry them ever 
onward toward a mighty goal. With the fifth chapter 
we turn back to the younger son, Jacob, whom God 

1 Verse 20 is the natural sequence of verse 8. The two gene- 
alogies, duplicates of one another, occur in a second inserted 
"Generations of Esau" (w. 9-19). The whole Esau section is 
curiously composite. 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 13 

selects above the elder son, Esau. This chapter 
(37 : 2-50 : 25) is entitled: "The Generations of Jacob," 
although in point of fact it tells little of Jacob. His 
story has practically been told under Isaac. Its inci- 
dents are connected especially with central Israel, 
Shechem, and Bethel, where were the well and the 
pillar of Jacob. He is, however, also connected with 
Beersheba, his father's home, as his descendants, the 
people Israel, were connected with the ancient and 
ancestral shrine of Beersheba. The continuance of 
Aramaean immigration and the purity from Canaanite 
admixture of the central stock is affirmed in the story 
of Jacob's journey to Mesopotamia, and his return 
with his Aramaean wives. On the other hand, the 
adoption of Canaanite units into the tribes of Israel is 
affirmed in the story of the four tribes who were chil- 
dren of concubines. Jacob himself is identified with 
Israel, and they are affirmed to be one and the same. 
With the stories of the older Jacob are mingled, as in 
the case of Abraham and Isaac, later historical reminis- 
cences. 1 This is true, also, in the story of Joseph, 

1 This is a familiar phenomenon of folk-lore, and of primitive 
or folk history. Many years ago I became interested in the 
Wends of the Spreewald, a Slav enclave in German territory, 
retaining its own ancient language and much of its ancient cus- 
toms and costumes. Their folk-lore, as I learned it, was largely 
that of their German neighbors as represented by Grimm's 
Fairy Tales, but Frederick the Great and his hussar general, 
Ziethen, moved and acted among the mythical and legendary 
events and characters of that folk-lore, often playing the part 
played by the fairies, heroes, or supernatural beings of Grimm's 
tales. Similarly in one version of the Nibelungen Lied we have 
Burgundian history and Burgundian historical characters of the 
fourteenth century A. D. mixed in with the events and characters 



# 



14 Bible and Spade 



'■te 



which constitutes the greater part of the chapter en- 
titled "The Generations of Jacob." Like Jacob, he 
also was connected with Sheehem, where his tomb is 
honored to this day, "The Generations of Jacob" 
are in fact the chapter on the twelve patriarchs, the 
legendary history of the twelve tribes of Israel of which 
Joseph's story was the chiefest. Jacob and the twelve 

of the old prehistoric Teutonic epic. Similarly, also, in the most 
complete form of the Babylonian Gilgamesh poem which has 
come down to us, through the late copy in Ashurbanipal's H-» 
brary, events of the history of the city of Erech toward the close 
of the third millennium B. C. are combined with much more 
archaic myths and legends. It follows from the above, also, 
that the fact that myths and legends are told as part of the story 
of an individual is not of itself a proof that no such individual 
existed, or that his whole story is a myth or a legend. The fail- 
ure to recognize this has resulted in some very curious misinter- 
pretations of history. The most delightful case in my own ex- 
perience was that of the great King Sargon of Akkad, who towers 
so mightily in old Babylonian story that he came to be encircled 
with a number of myths and legends. He was the son of di- 
vinity by a mortal and was exposed in an ark on the Euphrates. 
Through the merciful protection of the gods he was saved by 
an humble gardener, who took him as his son; and more of the 
same type. In 1890 a learned German scholar, Winckler, wrote 
a book proving him on this basis never to have existed, and him- 
self, his mighty empire, and his great achievements to be a mere 
mirage of myth and legend. Just at that time I was digging up 
at Nippur records and inscriptions of Sargon's very own self, 
proving incontrovertibly his existence, and substantiating the 
essential truth of his myth-embroidered story. In interpreting 
ancient Hebrew story and tradition we must be careful not to 
make a similar blunder. Because Moses was exposed in an ark, 
or because in Abraham's story are commingled events separated 
by centuries, it does not follow that such men never existed or 
that the essentials of their stories are untrue. Myth and legend 
are often merely a proof of the phenomenal greatness of the 
person about whom they are told; and myth and legend some- 
times grow and develop with remarkable rapidity, within very 
much lesi than a lifetime. 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 15 

patriarchs could not, however, be given separate chap- 
ters, because that would have interfered with the 
scheme of chapter arrangement. The second volume 
must contain five chapters, so that, added to the 
first volume, the whole book might consist of twelve 
chapters, the number of the twelve tribes. The first 
volume commences with creation, and the number of 
its chapters is the mystic number of days of creation; 
the second volume adds five, to give the complete 
number of Israel, and ends with the story of the twelve 
tribes, God's completed work. 

I have treated the scheme of Genesis somewhat at 
length, because I wished to use it as a means to show 
how recent research has established the truthfulness 
of the old Hebrew traditions contained in this twelve- 
chaptered book of Genesis. There was a time when 
these traditions were treated as literal history, as was 
the Roman story of Romulus and Remus suckled by 
the wolf. There followed a period of reaction, when, as 
history, these stories were brushed aside, and we began 
to build up the early story of hither Asia on other 
lines. A half-century ago some one, I do not now know 
surely who first propounded the theory, derived all 
the Semites from Arabia. Out of Arabia, as from a 
seething caldron, boiling over at intervals, forcing up 
the lid, and pouring out its excess of population in 
successive eruptions, came first, in the fourth millen- 
nium B. C, a flood of Semitic peoples in two streams, 
divided by the desert, occupying Babylonia on the 
east and northern Syria on the west. A thousand years 
later came another wave of invasion, which occupied 



16 Bible and Spade 

Canaan on the west, and on the east strengthened and 
modified the Semitic stock already in Babylonia. An- 
other thousand years later, about 1500 B. C, came 
another wave of invasion, the Aramaean, occupying 
Palestine, east and west of the Jordan, pushing north- 
ward into Syria, homing in Mesopotamia, and drift- 
ing into Babylonia. About a thousand years later 
came the Nabataeans, followed by the Lakhmids and 
the Ghassanids, on the east and west of the desert 
respectively. After approximately another millen- 
nium, in the seventh century of our era, came the great 
Mohammedan eruption of Arabs, which carried the 
farthest and spread the widest of all. It is a beauti- 
fully symmetrical scheme, a perfect specimen of nat- 
ural law functioning without interference, and it won 
universal acceptance. It passed beyond the stage of 
a working hypothesis, and came to be treated as a 
fundamental truth on which we might safely build, 
as on a rock, and we all proceeded to do so. 

Now observe that this theory of the ancestry of 
the Hebrews and their kin, the north Semitic peoples, 
quite disregards and entirely contradicts the tradi- 
tions and the records of Genesis. No one even thought 
of taking that into account. But even linguistics 
should have shown us the inherent improbability of 
this theory. The south Semitic languages — Arabic, 
Ethiopic, Minaean and Sabaean — on the one hand, and 
the north Semitic — Babylonian-Assyrian, Aramaean, 
and Canaanite-Hebrew — on the other, constitute two 
distinct groups. The peoples speaking the languages 
of these two groups could not have come out of one 
caldron in successive eruptions as depicted. The two 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 17 

groups as groups must have separated at some early 
time, and then each group developed by itself inde- 
pendently, so that each group came finally to contain 
subgroups and species of its own. How much time 
that required, how the original division took place, 
and w T hat was the habitat of the original Semitic stock 
before the division into the two great groups of north 
and south Semitic took place, we do not surely know. 
So far, however, as movements of the north Semitic 
peoples are concerned the testimony of the monu- 
ments flatly and at almost all points contradicts the 
theory we had evolved. As a result of excavations 
in Babylonia, Assyria, Palestine, and Egypt we are 
now able to present a pretty fair view of the history of 
racial movements in that part of hither Asia south of 
the centre of Asia Minor and north of the centre of 
Arabia, from the Persian mountains westward to the 
edge of the iEgean Sea, and including also Egypt, 
from somewhere in the fourth millennium B. C. onward. 
Before that time a Semitic immigration into, or inva- 
sion of, Egypt, from what side or source we do not 
surely know, had brought into being the mixed race 
which we know as Egyptian. At that time southern, 
and perhaps also central, Arabia may have been in- 
habited by the Semitic peoples whom we know later as 
Minaeans, Sabseans, etc., who early developed a high 
civilization in Yemen, and out of whom sprang Arabs 
and Ethiopians, the south Semitic group of which we 
have spoken. But our information about those re- 
gions is relatively late, and what their condition and 
stage of civilization was at the close of the fourth 
millennium we do not know. At that period there 



18 Bible and Spade 

were no northern Semites below Syria on the west and 
northern Babylonia on the east. Babylonia, when we 
first learn anything about it from the inscriptions 
found at Nippur and Lagash, was inhabited by a non- 
Semitic people, whom we call Sumerians, after the 
name of their land, Sumer, the biblical Shinar. They 
were already at that time a civilized people, with a 
well-developed script, having its original picture-writ- 
ing far behind it. In general the people of the Eu- 
phrates and Tigris valley stood on the same plane of 
civilization as the Egyptians of the Nile valley, each 
civilization, however, having developed independently 
of the other. The home of this civilization seems to 
have been from somewhere in the archipelago at the 
head of the Persian Gulf, then 100 miles or more farther 
north than at present, to Nippur, 100 miles south of 
Baghdad. Apparently their towns and cities reached 
northward as far as Kalah Sherghat, ancient Ashur, 
on the Tigris, where their remains seem to have been 
found beneath those of the Semitic Assyrians by the 
German excavators. This civilization also extended 
eastward into Elam, the Karun valley in modern 
Persia; but linguistically Babylonians and Elamites 
differed. When our written records begin, toward the 
close of the fourth millennium, there were Semitic 
cities in northern Babylonia, and up the Euphrates 
into northern Syria. The inhabitants of the latter 
region were known as Amorites, 1 the people of the west 

1 The name Amorite is here used roughly of all the western 
Semites before the advent on the scene of the Aramaeans. It 
is well attested for the period about 2500 B. C, it is not so cer- 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 19 

land, but the Semites in northern Babylonia were also 
of the same stock, as we know from the names found 
in the inscriptions. The inscriptions show the Semitic 
states of northern Babylonia gradually growing stronger 
in the third millennium and pressing down more and 
more on the Sumerian cities of the south. About 
2500 they acquire a dominant position, apparent evi- 
dence that the Semitic element in Babylonia was 
strongly reinforced and dominated at, or somewhat 
before, that time by immigration or invasion from the 
north or northwest. By the close of this millennium 
we find the whole of Babylonia constituting a Semitic 
empire under Babylon as its capital with, northward 
of this, the strong Semitic state of Assyria, while a 
homogeneous Semitic Babylonian culture and civili- 
zation extends all over hither Asia south of the Taurus 
mountains, and even beyond the Taurus into Cappa- 
docia of Asia Minor. Manifestly the Semites have 
been pressing down from the north, not up from the 
south. 

Excavations in Palestine, especially at Gezer and 
Jerusalem, have revealed conditions confirmatory of 
this view of the direction of the Semitic movement, 
derived from Hebrew tradition and Babylonian and 
Assyrian inscriptions. Before 2500 B. C. Palestine 
was inhabited by a non-Semitic population, rude trog- 

tain that it can properly be used as the designation of the west 
Semites before that date. Similarly it is not clear whether be- 
fore the arrival of the Aramaeans on the scene we have two 
Semitic substocks, successively moving southward from Asia 
Minor, or one moving southward continuously or rather inter- 
mittently over a very long period, with varying intensity. 



20 Bible and Spade 

lodytes; the beginners of those wonderful eaves which 
are among the marvels of Palestine, and the impres- 
sion of which upon the Jews is reflected in the refer- 
ences to their troglodytic predecessors in their legends 
and their folk-lore. Egyptian writings agree with this 
in so far as they exhibit Palestine as a barbarous re- 
gion at this time. Somewhere about 2500 B. C, how- 
ever, the excavators found the remains of a Semitic 
house-building people taking the place of those of this 
earlier, ruder, non-Semitic people. 

The record seems to show that up to about 2500 B. 
C. a civilized non-Semitic people, the Sumerians, were 
in possession of southern Babylonia, but were being 
pressed upon by the Semites from the north; and that 
up to the same date Palestine was occupied by uncivi- 
lized non-Semitic peoples, the Sinaitic region being also 
in the possession of wild tribes, but more or less under 
control of Egypt, because of her mining interests. 
Between Babylonia and the uncivilized regions of 
Palestine and the Sinaitic lay a desert. To the north 
of this desert were aggressive northern Semites press- 
ing southward; far off to the south of it were the south- 
ern Semites of Arabia. About 2500 B. C. the Semites 
gain the supremacy over the Sumerians in southern 
Babylonia, and at the same time a Semitic people occu- 
pies Palestine. Similarity of names at this period in 
Syria and Babylonia show that these Semites were all 
of the same stock, the Amorite. About the same time, 
also, some catastrophe befalls Egyptian civilization, 
and Egyptian records fail. This catastrophe is gen- 
erally supposed to have been due to a foreign invasion, 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 21 

and in view of the evidence of the invasion of Baby- 
lonia and Palestine by the Semitic Amorites at this 
time it is natural to suppose that it was hordes of the 
same stock which invaded Egypt and for a time pre- 
vented its civilization from functioning. In Syria 
and Babylonia the invaders more readily assimilated 
the existing civilization, and before the close of the 
third millennium we find, from inscriptions recovered 
in Babylonia, Assyria, and Cappadocia, that the re- 
gion from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf was 
practically unified in culture and civilization and that 
a north Semitic, Babylonian script and language were 
in use well into Central Asia Minor. This was the 
great Amorite-Semitic invasion, and to this Amorite 
stock belong the Phoenicians and the Canaanites whom 
later the Israelites found in possession of the Holy 
Land. 

Early in the second millennium Indo-European peo- 
ples began to press southward into Asia Minor, spurs 
or downthrusts, apparently, of that great movement 
eastward which brought the Aryans into Iran and 
India, and left the Scythians on the Russian and Cen- 
tral Asian plains. The most westerly of these down- 
thrusts seems to have crossed over into Asia near the 
mouth of the Hellespont, in the Troad. Another, 
crossing near the mouth of .the Bosphorus, pushed 
southward, establishing ultimately the Hittite empire 
in central Asia Minor, with Chatti, the modern Boghaz 
Keui, as its capital; another, perhaps descending from 
the northeast, founded the kingdom of the Mitanni in 
Mesopotamia; while eastward still another spur di- 



22 Bible and Spade 

rectly or indirectly overran Babylonia as Cassites and 
founded the Cassite dynasty there. 1 This was pre- 
cisely like the later movements of the Scythians in 
the seventh century B. C, who overran hither Asia, 
establishing settlements as far west as Palestine; like 
the conquest of Central Asia by a small horde of 20,000 
Galatians a few centuries later; like the sea raids of 
the Normans in the ninth and following centuries of 
our era, all of these European peoples moving south- 
ward and eastward; or like the similar westward move- 
ments of Asiatic hordes, Huns, Mongolians, and Turks, 
who later penetrated, overran, and established king- 
doms in Europe and hither Asia. The conquerors 
were a relatively small body who dominated and ruled 
over a large mass with whom they ultimately amalga- 
mated, sometimes being assimilated in language as 
in civilization, sometimes imposing their own language 
and customs on the country, and sometimes the two 
languages and civilizations combining, as in England. 2 
Such invasions resulted from various causes, chiefly 
economic, pressure of population, change of climate 

1 According to the records discovered, the Hittites took and 
sacked Babylon in 1925, overthrowing the native Semitic dy- 
nasty, and thus preparing the way for the Cassite rule. 

2 The Mitanni show the most striking evidences of Indo- 
European origin in the names of their gods. In the case of 
Hittites and Cassites the evidence is rather linguistic, certain 
features of those languages appearing to be clearly European. 
It must be confessed, however, that our knowledge of those 
languages is as yet very imperfect, and in what we know there 
are other features as distinctly not Indo-European. The present 
evidence suggests such a union of a small governing people with 
a vastly larger mass alien in tongue as I have assumed above, but 
we are not yet out of the realm of speculation. 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 23 

(especially diminution of rainfall resulting from earth 
changes, and consequent desiccation of the homeland 1 ), 
desire for easier conditions, greed for the goods and 
wealth of richer peoples, ambition and adventure, and 
religious zeal or fanaticism. Such, single or combined, 
have been the motives which led peoples to leave their 
former domiciles and invade the lands of others.' Con- 
quest by such invaders was rendered possible by the 
effeminacy and pacifism of the more numerous and 
more civilized peoples conquered; or by some superi- 
ority in armament of the invaders over the invaded, 
as of copper over stone, iron over copper, gunpowder 
over steel. Such invasions and conquests always push 
out other foot-loose people, who, in their turn, may be- 
come invaders of other lands. 

Some of the Indo-Europeans who invaded Asia 
Minor and established kingdoms there, pushed on 
farther southward with hordes of Asia Minorites, who 
had been driven out of their homes. The bulk of 
these hordes were pretty surely Semites, still of the 
older stock of Amorites, but they probably were led 
or officered by the conquering Indo-Europeans. So 
it is that the Bible tells us of Hittites among the popu- 
lations of Palestine as far south as Hebron. Now 
these Indo-Europeans had prevailed over the Asia 



ir The excavations and explorations of Raphael Pumpelly in 
Turkestan, especially at and about Anau, seem to indicate this 
as the cause of extensive emigration from that region. There 
appear to be evidences of some touch of the people of this re- 
gion with Babylonia at an early period, and also of emigration 
from this region westward into Europe; but the work done is not 
sufficient to give assured results. 



24 Bible and Spade 

Minorites partly, surely, because they had horses; 
and this is the first appearance of the horse upon the 
stage of military history. It was the possession of 
the horse, 1 thus introduced, which enabled these foot- 
loose hordes to sweep over Mesopotamia and Syria, 
and to enter and conquer Egypt, in the history of which 
country they are known as Hyksos. They established 
a loosely knit empire of great extent, whose exact 
boundaries we do not know, but which surely included 
Egypt and probably extended to the Taurus and the 
Euphrates. In general character it was presumably 
like some of the Mongolian empires of the Middle 
Ages. The Hyksos capital, Avaris, lay on the border 
between Egypt and Asia, and from this point the Hyk- 
sos ruled Egypt for 200 years. 

Then came the reaction. Egypt, pressed to the 
ground, rose from it, like the giant of Greek story, to a 
new and vigorous life. It became a warrior nation. 
It appropriated the horse, and its chariots and horses 
became famous. It conquered Avaris, drove the 
Hyksos out of Egypt, and then attacked them in their 
Asiatic strongholds, of which Kadesh on the Orontes 
seems to have been the chief, gradually subduing 
Palestine and Syria to the Taurus and Euphrates, 
then crossing the Euphrates and attacking the Hkysos's 
cousins, the Mitanni of Mesopotamia. Among the 
various elements of this Asiatic Hyksos empire, which 
we find mentioned in the Egyptian records of these 
wars, are Jacob-her, or Jacob-el, the Jacob of the Bible, 

1 It is with the Cassites that we first have certain evidence of 
the use of the horse in war. 




Photograph by Prof. Elihu Grant. 

Jacob's Pillar. 

Natural stones of memorial, of superhuman size, traditionally ascribed to 
Jacob, constituting the sacred feature of the Temple at Bethel. 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 25 

and Joseph-el, the Joseph of the Bible, Amorite peoples 
of central Palestine whose homeland and sanctuaries 
the Hebrews later amalgamated with their own Israel. 1 
Before the Hyksos conquest of Egypt, as we know from 
the Babylonian records, reflected also in the Bible, in 
the story of Abraham and Amraphel (Gen. 14), Pales- 
tine lay in the sphere of Babylonian influence and of 
Babylonian raids and conquests. After the over- 
throw of the Hyksos power and the establishment of 
the great Egyptian empire of the eighteenth dynasty, 
Egyptian culture and influence predominated through- 
out Palestine, as we learn from the excavations con- 
ducted at Lachish, Gezer, and Taanach; 2 except only 
that the Babylonian script and language continued to 
be the medium of international intercourse throughout 
all western Asia. It is indeed to Canaanite records, 
written in this Babylonian script and language, dis- 
covered in Egypt about a third of a century ago (1887- 
1888), that we owe our information about the fall of 
that Egyptian Asiatic empire, and the part in it which 
the Hebrews played. Those records are known as the 
Tel el-Amarna tablets, because they were written on 
clay tablets in the cuneiform script, and were found 
at the tel, or ruin mound, called el-Amarna, covering 
the site of Akhetaton, the capital of Akhenaton, or 

1 The same names, Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph, appear at 
this time in Babylonia as personal names. The Jacob and 
Joseph of the Egyptian records are the names of peoples. In 
a similar manner later we find in the Assyrian records the per- 
sonal name of Omri, king of Israel, used to designate land and 
people long after the death of the actual Omri. 

2 The Egyptian dominance of Egypt in Canaan is reflected in 
the close relationship of Canaan to Egypt in old Hebrew legend. 



26 Bible and Spade 

Ikhnaton, the reformer king of Egypt, 1375-1358 
B.C. 

At the beginning of the fifteenth century before 
Christ a belt of civilization, including both shores of 
the Mediterranean, extended vaguely from Spain on 
the west to China on the east, and from the Black 
Sea on the north to Nubia on the south. In this belt 
the great centres of civilization and power, of which 
we have certain knowledge, were Crete and the iEgean, 
Egypt, the Hittite empire in Asia Minor, the Mitanni 
in Mesopotamia, and farther eastward and northward 
Assyria, Babylon, and Elam. These all had their own 
systems of writing and kept records of some sort. In 
the ruins of this period we find tin, apparently from 
Central Europe, and amber from the Baltic, evidence 
of trade relations with those regions through the Black 
Sea, the Danube, and the Vistula; lapis lazuli from 
Bactria, and jade and cobalt from China. 1 It was the 
summit of the civilization of the copper age. 

At that period all of the country from the Mediter- 
ranean to the Persian mountains and from the Red 
Sea and the Persian Gulf up to the Taurus mountains 
and beyond them into Asia Minor was thoroughly 
Semitized, speaking a Semitic tongue and using the 
Babylonian script, although dominated in part by 



1 In one store of a maker of votives in a booth outside the en- 
closure of the temple at Nippur of a date about 1400 B. C, I 
found amber from the Baltic, lapis lazuli from Bactria, magnesite 
from Euboea, bronze, alloyed with tin, probably from Saxony 
or Cornwall, malachite and turquoise, apparently from Sinai, 
and glass run in moulds as inscribed axe heads and colored to 
imitate lapis lazuli with cobalt from China. 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 27 

rulers of other origin, the Egyptians on the west, in 
Palestine and Syria, the Hittites, the Mitanni, and the 
Cassites in southern Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, and 
Babylonia. This Semitic stock, it should be added, 
was not Aramaean, but, to use the term somewhat 
inaccurately, Amorite, the stock from which derive 
the Phoenicians and the Canaanites. The relations 
of the Semites of Palestine to Egypt, as a result of the 
conquests of the Thutmoses, the eighteenth Egyptian 
dynasty, were intimate, and in the reigns of the later 
kings of that dynasty certainly friendly. Many 
Semites brought into Egypt as slaves became a little 
later tax-paying serfs, on a par with the ordinary Egyp- 
tian fellaheen. Syrians and Palestinians are repre- 
sented on the monuments and inscriptions as coming 
and going freely, as settling in Egypt, and even occu- 
pying a position of influence there. The internal con- 
ditions of this period, the centring of all power in the 
hands of an autocratic king, are those depicted in the 
story of Joseph in the book of Genesis. 

At that time, as I have already noted, a people or 
district in central Palestine was known to the Egyp- 
tians as Jacob-el and another as Joseph-el, and to this 
day there exist in the valley of Shechem (the name of 
which place occurs, by the way, in Egyptian records) 
eastward of the present town of Nablous, as the valley 
opens out into the plain of Makhna, the well of Jacob 
and the tomb of Joseph, the traditions of which go 
back to a period antedating the conquest and occupa- 
tion of the country by the Hebrews. Just before the 
war there was discovered, close to this traditional tomb 



28 Bible and Spade 

of Joseph, a brick tomb, quite unlike all tombs hereto- 
fore discovered in Palestine, containing, with the bones 
of a man, utensils, and armor, and weapons, including 
a dagger, a coat of mail, and a truncheon of bronze, 
the dagger and truncheon enamelled and inlaid with 
precious metals in the unmistakable style of the eigh- 
teenth Egyptian dynasty of the fifteenth century 
B. C. Apparently it was the tomb of an Egyptian 
official of high rank. While the exact bearing of all 
this may not yet be altogether plain, it shows at least 
that there lies historic truth behind the story of Joseph 
in the book of Genesis. 

Certain origins of the Hebrew religion can also be 
traced back to the time of the eighteenth Egyptian 
dynasty. The name Moses is unmistakably Egyp- 
tian, the same which appears in composition in the 
names of the earlier and greatest kings of that dynasty, 
Ahmoses and Thutmoses, and which is common in 
inscriptions throughout that entire dynasty. The Ark 
has its closest affinities with Egyptian ritual use, and 
the monotheistic or quasi-monotheistic basis of Mosa- 
ism suggests strongly the monotheistic or quasi-mono- 
theistic religion of the reformer king, Amenophis IV or 
Ikhnaton, with whom, and as a consequence of which, 
that dynasty came to an end. This reformer, it will 
be remembered, received his education at, and derived 
his inspiration from, Heliopolis, or On, and there also, 
according to the Hebrew account, Moses was trained 
in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. This reformer 
king, Amenhotep IV, it will be remembered, changed 
his religion from the worship of Amen, the great god 




Photograph by Prof. Elihu Grant. 

Jacob's Pillar from below. 

Behind and above these stones, northward, the hill rises to a crest, 

called anciently Jacob's Ladder. 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 29 

of Thebes, to that of Aton, the sun disk, more espe- 
cially characteristic of Memphis. Similarly he changed 
his name from Amenhotep (Amenophis) to Akhenaton 
or Ikhnaton. At the same time he broke with the 
ancient conventions in art, and in social and religious 
etiquette. Basing on the Memphis worship of Aton, 
he sought to make a purer and quasi-monotheistic 
religion out of that worship, and to have the freer hand 
to do so, abandoning Thebes, he built himself a new 
capital, called Akhetaton, after the name of his god, 
the present ruin heaps of Amarna, where the tablets 
above referred to were discovered. After his death a 
reaction set in, the priests of Amen at Thebes gained 
the upper hand, and persecuted the Atonites as Ikh- 
naton had persecuted the Amenites. Ikhnaton's new 
capital was destroyed, and Thebes again became the 
capital, and Amends religion and Amends priests ruled 
Egypt as never before. Ikhnaton's statues and Ikh- 
naton's inscriptions were defaced and effaced, and an 
effort was made to blot out all memory of him from 
the land. Enough remains, however, to enable pres- 
ent-day scholars, as the result of their excavations and 
decipherments of inscriptions, to restore in its main 
features the history of his reform and the doctrines 
of his religion. The latter was strongly monotheistic 
in its tendencies, as witness the following from a 
"Hymn in Praise of Aton": 



t( 



How manifold are all thy works ! 

They are hidden from before us, 

O thou sole god whose powers no other possesseth"; 



30 Bible and Spade 

which might equally as well constitute part of some 
Hebrew ritual (cf. Ps. 104 : 24). 

Still more striking in its monotheism is the follow- 
ing from a hymn to the Sun-god: 



a 



Who determines his own birth, 

# * • • « *• # *. 

The primordial being, who himself made himself, 
Who beholds that which he has made, 
Sole lord taking captive all lands every day, 
As one beholding them that walk therein; 
Shining in the sky a being as the sun." 1 



But to return to the fall of the Egyptian empire in 
Syria and the relation to that of the Hebrews. It was 
when that empire was at the height of its power and 
splendor, during the reign of Amenhotep III, the Mag- 
nificent, that its decadence commenced. The letters 
from Egyptian governors and subject kings and allies 
found at Amarna tell the tale. New folk movements 
were evidently in progress in the north. In some con- 
nection with these the Hittites poured down from 
Asia Minor over the Taurus into northern Syria, oust- 
ing Amorites and destroying or amalgamating their 
states. At the same time appear Aramaean tribes and 
peoples, pushed out of their abode to the north and 
northeast. These press into Syria and Palestine and 
also into Assyria and Babylonia, the Sutu and Kha- 
biru, or Hebrews. These Hebrews, it must be under- 

1 Translations from Breasted's Religion and Thought in An* 
dent Egypt* 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 31 

stood, were not the Hebrews in our ordinary restricted 
sense of the term, but the whole stock of which our 
Hebrews were but a part, Moab, Ammon, Edom, 
Amalek, and certain of the nomadic or Bedouin peo- 
ples of the desert and the desert border. 1 The gene- 
alogies given in Genesis enable us to determine, in 
general, the order in which they acquired settled abodes 
and became nations, as also their general affinities to 
one another and to Israel. 

It was, however, under the son of Amenhotep III, 
Amenhotep IV, or Ikhnaton, that the danger from these 
invasions became imminent. He was a pacifist of the 
most extreme type, an anti-imperialist, concerned only 
with the internal affairs of Egypt, and of those almost 
exclusively with spiritual affairs. In the midst of the 
pressing dangers consequent on the attacks of external 
foes, he reduced the Egyptian army to a peace footing, 
and failed, if he did not refuse, to give assistance to his 
hard-pressed allies, subject kings, and governors. The 
letters to him found at Amarna depict the situation 
and his attitude vividly. One of his vassals from 
Syria writes: "Verily thy father did not march forth 
nor inspect the lands of the vassal princes." Ap- 
parently Amenophis the Magnificent preferred to send 
his generals, while he enjoyed his magnificence at 
home, unlike that doughty warrior emperor who cre- 
ated the Asiatic empire, Thutmose III. But worse 

1 Of these we commonly speak as Arabs, which is correct in so far 
as we use Arab as a term to denote a Bedouin condition of life, 
but not in its linguistic or ethnological sense. The Ishmaelites 
and other Bedouins of the Sinaitic and neighboring regions were 
Amorite or Aramaean linguistically and in the main ethnologically. 



32 Bible and Spade 

was to come: "When thou," his pacifist son, "ascend- 
edst the throne, Abdashirta's sons took the king's land 
for themselves. Creatures of the King of Mitanni are 
they, and of the King of Babylon, and of the King of 
the Hittites." Those three, Hittites of Asia Minor, 
Mitanni of Mesopotamia, and Cassites of Babylonia, 
states or dynasties of supposed Indo-European origin, 
are making common cause against the Egyptian em- 
pire in Syria, the whole Amorite or native Syrian 
princes of the older Semitic stock are seizing the op- 
portunity to declare their independence and annex 
such other territory as they could, pretending now to 
be on one side, now on another, so that the inefficient 
Egyptian foreign office was as likely to support foe as 
friend. According to a letter from the important town 
of Tunip this had then been going on for twenty years, 
and in this time no help had come from Egypt. In 
the south the conditions were similar. Troops of 
Khabiri, the Aramaean invaders, took service as merce- 
naries with Egyptian governors and subject kings 
alike. The various petty kings accuse one another 
of treasonable purpose, each professes to be loyal to 
Egypt and calls to the Pharaoh for help against the 
other and his Hebrew allies. 

The Pharaoh seems to have turned all authority 
over to an official of Semitic race, Dudu or David by 
name, much as in the story contained in Genesis 
Pharaoh turned authority over to Joseph; and here we 
have evidence of the position which Semites of the old 
Amorite stock, Jacob, held in Egypt during the eigh- 
teenth dynasty, which was the friendly Pharaoh of 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 33 

the Bible story. Abdkhiba 1 of Jerusalem, whose 
letters are among the most interesting and illuminat- 
ing in the Amarna archives, writes to this David, 
"the scribe of my lord the king," telling him to "bring 
these words plainly before my lord the king," that 
"the whole land of my lord the king is going to ruin." 
Many of the Palestinians had forsaken their towns, 
and taken to the hills, or sought refuge in Egypt, 
where the Egytian officer in charge of some of them 
said of them: "They have been destroyed and their 
town laid waste — their countries are starving, they 
live like goats of the mountain." We are told "that 
a few of the Asiatics, who knew not how they should 
live, have come' seeking for domicile in Pharaoh's 
land, after a manner known from the time of Pharaoh's 
"father's fathers." The Pharaoh orders them to be 
settled in a region where they might protect the borders 
of his land, just as we are told that when Jacob and 
his children came down into Egypt they were settled 
in the land of Goshen. The reference in these letters 
to the fact that Asiatics had sought refuge in Egypt 
on account of famine in earlier times is borne out by 
inscriptions of those periods, which tell us of such 
famines, and one, at least, tells us of a seven-year 
famine in Egypt, like that described in the Joseph story. 
With Ikhnaton's death came, as already stated, the 
counter-revolution in Egypt. The priests of Thebes, 
whom he had attempted to depose from their high 

1 Note the compound name, half Semitic, half Hittite, and com- 
pare with this EzekieFs statement of the composite Amorite- 
Hittite ancestry of Jerusalem, 16 : 3; cf. also Gen. 25 : 34. 



34 Bible and Spade 

eminence, and whose religion he had persecuted, re- 
gained their power and destroyed Ikhnaton's city, 
which has remained desert to this day; and hence 
the discovery of these present archives. The land 
naturally fell into confusion. Egypt lost not only 
Syria, but also Palestine, only retaining a shadowy 
claim on the latter. This was the period when Moab 
and Amnion became nations, occupying the territory 
east of the Dead Sea and the Jordan, the country 
known as Rutenu in the Egyptian inscriptions, that 
is Lotan or Lot, 1 whence Moab and Ammon, after a 
fashion similar everywhere, became the children of 
Lot, just as the Israelites were later to become the 
children of Jacob, with Isaac and Abraham as grand- 
parent and great-grandparent. Between these two 
Hebrew or Khabiru nations, Moab and Ammon, there 
remained, according to the Israelite account, a rem- 
nant of the older Amorite peoples, whom the Israelites 
later conquered, thus locating themselves between 
their kindred peoples, Moab and Ammon. We have 
seen how Asiatics poured into the Egyptian border- 
lands during the Hebrew invasions. It appears from 
the Bible story that at some period before the close 
of the eighteenth dynasty Aramaean ancestors of 
Israel did the same thing. We have, however, no 
Egyptian record of that date which mentions them 
by name. The name Israel first appears in an inscrip- 
tion of Merneptah of the succeeding nineteenth dy- 
nasty, who also tells us of Edomites (from the descrip- 

*L of Semite names appears as r in Egyptain, as in reverse 
fashion the Chinese convert our r into b 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 35 

tion, I fancy, they were rather what we commonly 
call Amalekites), who were a part or offshoot of Edom 
(cf. Gen. 36), coming info Egypt in his day in precisely 
the way described above. 

With the nineteenth dynasty, Egypt comes out of 
the state of confusion into which it had been thrown 
by the reform and counter-reform and revolution of 
the closing days of the eighteenth dynasty, and under 
a new and strong king, Seti, the first king of that dy- 
nasty, it begins to reassert its suzerainty in Palestine 
and Syria. In the latter country the Hittites had by 
this time established a strong kingdom, and after over- 
running Palestine the Egyptians found themselves 
face to face with an empire quite equal to their own. 
Seti's son, Ramses II, has left us an account of his wars 
with the Hittites, from which we learn that in a great 
battle fought near Kadesh on the Orontes there were 
in the army of the Hittite king contingents from as far 
north as Cilicia and Bedouin elements from the south. 
Apparently Hittites and Amorites and Aramaeans were 
all fighting together under his standard. The battle 
in which, through bad strategy, Ramses almost suffered 
defeat was barely redeemed by his personal valor. 
He claims the victory. It seems in fact to have been 
a drawn battle in which both sides suffered heavily. 
Later a treaty was concluded with the Hittite king, 
Hattusil, a copy of which in Egyptian was found on 
Ramses's monuments, and a corresponding copy in the 
Hittite language has recently been found at the Hittite 
capital, known as Hatti City, the modern Boghaz Keui 
in northern Central Asia Minor. 



36 Bible and Spade 

It seems clear from the story of Exodus that this 
Ramses II was the Pharaoh of the oppression. We 
are told that the Israelites were compelled by the 
Pharaoh to labor at building store cities in Goshen, 
Ramses and Pithom. One of these, Pithom, has in 
fact been discovered, and proved to be a construction 
of Ramses. One can well see the necessity which he 
had, on one hand, of labor for his vast undertakings 
and, on the other, of holding down and rendering 
powerless the large Asiatic element which in previous 
reigns had been brought into Egypt, and which would 
naturally be sympathetic with the enemies in Asia 
whom Ramses was fighting. It is more difficult to 
determine the date of the Exodus and the name of the 
Pharaoh of the Exodus, for the Israelite record gives us 
no names of the Pharaohs, but only the title Pharaoh, 
which belongs alike to all. The tendency of the latter 
years had been to assume as the Pharaoh of the Exodus 
Merneptah, Ramses's successor, but in 1896 there was 
discovered an inscription of Merneptah regarding what 
appears to have been a punitive expedition into Pal- 
estine. It reads as follows, translating freely the 
names or designations of the people mentioned: "No 
one among the foreign nations raises his head. The 
Libyans are destroyed. The Hittites are at peace. 
Canaan is captive in all its quarters. Ashkelon is 
carried into captivity. Gezer is taken. Yenoam is 
annihilated. Israel is destroyed; its crops are no more. 
South Palestine has become like a widow. All the 
lands are in peace together. Their leader has been 
conquered by King Merneptah, who, like the sun, 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 37 

gives light each day/ 5 A boastful proclamation of 
general victory over all foes, and a truly royal and 
Egyptian exaggeration! But, however much it may 
be exaggerated, and however false may be some of the 
claims made by him, the important point is that Mer- 
neptah mentions Israel as being in his day among the 
occupants of southern Palestine; apparently, there- 
fore, we must place the period of the Exodus a little 
earlier than Merneptah, somewhere in the long reign 
of Ramses II, who was also the Pharaoh of the oppres- 
sion. 

We have in Hebrew tradition one indication of the 
date of the Exodus, from the period in which records 
had begun to be kept in the kingdom of Judah. In 
I Kings, 6th chapter, and 1st verse, we are told that 
"in the 480th year after the children of Israel were 
come out of the land of Egypt, in the 4th year of 
Solomon's reign over Israel, in the second month," 
he began to build the temple. Now he began to build 
the temple about 950 B. C. Counting back from that 
date 480 years, we have the year 1430, which would 
carry us back long before the time of Amenophis III, 
in whose reign we find the earliest mention, in the 
Amarna letters, of Hebrews. 

In the year 1882 there was discovered, in the city 
of Sippar in Babylonia, a record dated in a similar 
manner. Nabonidus, the last Babylonian king, who, 
like Ikhnaton of Egypt, was a dreamer, a religious 
reformer, and a pacifist, brought his army from Gaza 
and set it, not to prepare to resist the aggressions of 
Cyrus, but to excavate Sippar, the temple of which he 



38 Bible and Spade 

desired to restore. There he tells us that they un- 
earthed the record of the great king, Naram Sin, which 
no one before him had ever seen, since it had been de- 
posited there 3,200 years before. Curiously, the schol- 
ars who were all so suspicious of Hebrew and Bible 
dates, and who had quite thrown away the 480 years 
from Solomon to the Exodus, accepted this date with- 
out question, and with one accord Assyriologists de- 
clared that Naram Sin reigned in Akkad, the capital 
of which was Sippar, 3750 B. C, and his father Sargon, 
the great half-mythical king of old Semitic Babylonian 
story, they consequently placed about 3800 B. C. 
These they regarded as ascertained dates, from which 
they proceeded confidently to count backward and 
forward. I believe that for a good while I was the 
only scholar who protested this dating. I noted that 
in the case of the Babylonian, as in the case of the 
Hebrew, record each number, 480 and 3200, was a mul- 
tiple of 40, which is used continually in the Old Testa- 
ment to indicate a generation. I suspected that in 
the case of the Babylonian date what had been done 
by the scribe was to count the number of kings in the 
king's lists which he had before him, L e. } the number 
of royal generations from Nabonidus to Naram Sin. 
He found 80 names of kings, and multiplying 80 by 40, 
the number of years to a generation, he obtained the 
number 3200. But in reality a generation is much 
shorter than 40 years. Taking all the king lists of 
Israel, Judah, Assyria, and Babylonia, which were 
then available, and averaging the reigns of the kings 
in those lists, I found that the average royal genera- 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 39 

tion was considerably less than thirty years, and sug- 
gested accordingly that this number should be reduced 
by about 1,000 years, and that the real date of Sargon 
was therefore more nearly 2,800 than 3,800, which 
seemed to me also to fit in better with what we knew 
from other sources. When I came to excavate old 
Nippur, I found in fact that the remains of Sargon lay, 
without intervening strata (or with almost no inter- 
vening strata), immediately below those of Ur Gur, 
king of Ur, whose date was nearer the middle of the 
third than of the fourth millennium. To-day all 
scholars are agreed that Sargon belongs not in the 
fourth, but in the third millennium, and the latest 
authorities date him about 2600 or 2650 B. C, 150 or 
200 years later than I had suggested as his earliest 
possible date. 

Apply the same method to the Hebrew date recorded 
in I Kings, and I think we shall obtain approxi- 
mately the date for the Exodus which I have suggested. 
If you will regard the 480 years as meaning twelve 
generations, and suppose that the scribes of Solomon 
who have left us this record had lists of some sort 
from which they counted out twelve generations, and 
will then reduce those generations in the manner in 
which I suggested in the case of the Babylonian in- 
scriptions, counting each generation as not forty but 
between twenty and thirty years, you will have, in- 
stead of 480, approximately 330 years, and the date of 
the Exodus would fall about 1280, in the earlier part 
of the reign of Ramses II. This, as you will see, will 
fall in line with Merneptah's inscription also. 



40 Bible and Spade 

I called attention earlier to the fact that about 
1400 B. C. the civilization of the copper age had 
reached its climax, and that at that time we begin to 
find signs of an approaching downfall. Movements 
in the north, of nations of the same stock as our own 
ancestors, and in the east and northeast movements 
of peoples of other stock from Central Asia, were exert- 
ing pressure on the civilized and semicivilized lands 
in Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor. It was probably 
partly this which led the Hittites to cross the Taurus 
mountains and invade Syria. In the time of Ramses 
II we find Sardinians from the Italian region serving 
as mercenaries, just as we saw that the Hebrews 
served as mercenaries for and against the Egyptians 
in the time of Ikhnaton. These folk movements in- 
creased in force and volume, until about 1200 B. C. 
we are plunged in Cimmerian gloom, dark ages com- 
parable to those which followed the movements of the 
barbarian hordes that overthrew the Roman empire 
in the post-Christian period. All the world seemed 
afoot. This was the period of the Dorian invasion of 
Greek legend, which brought the Greeks into Greece 
and overthrew the Mycensean-iEgean civilization. 
Egyptian inscriptions of King Ramses III, of the 
twentieth dynasty, show us hordes of Sardinians, 
Philistines, and tribes from Crete and the iEgean isl- 
ands and the shores of Asia Minor, pouring down by 
sea and by land on the Egyptian coast, and into Syria 
and Palestine. He claims to have met and defeated 
those hordes, but if he succeeded in repelling them 
from his own borders, it is clear that he failed to expel 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 41 

them from Palestine and Syria. The great Hittite 
empire which had lasted for 200 years was blotted 
out. The Philistines and their kindred tribes whom 
we find mentioned, some in the Hebrew, some in the 
Egyptian records, gained possession of the Palestinian 
coastland southward of Phoenicia. Farther eastward 
the kingdom of Mitanni in Mesopotamia was over- 
thrown and the Cassite rule over Babylonia came to 
an end. The invaders in those eastern regions were 
Aramaeans, who were being pushed out of their homes 
in Asia Minor by invasions of Asianic hordes, as the 
kindred Amorites had been pressed out at the time of 
the invasions of the Hittites, and were pouring south- 
ward in many tribes. We can get few details of this 
period. We know surely only what went before and 
what followed after. This was the period when the 
Hebrews, moving out of the south land of Palestine, 
settled themselves first in the country between Moab 
and Ammon, conquering the Amorites who were in 
possession, and from there, after how long a period 
we do not know, invaded Palestine. Partly from the 
later writings of their historians, partly from their 
folk-lore and traditions, recorded especially in the 
names, locations, and relationships of their tribes, we 
know that it was the elder branch, the children of 
Leah, who first settled eastward of Jordan, as Reuben, 
the oldest son, and who also first crossed the Jordan 
into Canaan in the south, as Judah, the second son, 
and in the centre, as Simeon and Levi, came to grief 
at Shechem, 1 those tribes losing henceforth their tribal 

^Gen. 35. 



42 Bible and Spade 

existence and identity. Reuben, the elder son, that 
is the first one settled, remained in the region first 
conquered, which is the meaning in fact of the state- 
ment in the genealogy that Reuben was the eldest 
son. Judah pushed across the Jordan, just north of 
the Dead Sea, following the road toward Bethlehem, 
and ultimately united with kindred peoples, Calebites 
and Kenizzites, at and about Hebron and southward, 
to form the great historical tribe of Judah. In the 
north, by the plain of Esdraelon, the tribes of Zebulun 
and Issachar entered western Palestine, settling in that 
plain and in lower Galilee. To these children of Leah, 
full-blooded Aramaeans, were joined in Canaan two 
peoples of the older Amorite stock, already in the coun- 
try, Gad in Gilead by Reuben, and Asher 1 northward, 
by Zebulun and Issachar, which is the meaning of 
the story in the Bible that these were children, not of 
Jacob's wife Leah, but of the concubine whom she gave 
to Jacob. . The second invasion was that of the Joseph- 
ite tribes, of whom Manasseh was the elder, that is, 
he first attained the settled state, pushing in to the 
north of Reuben, and sharing with Gad, the son of 
his stepmother Leah's handmaid, i. e.> an Amorite 
people adopted into Israel, Gilead, beyond Jordan. 
Later they pushed across the Jordan, and as Ephraim 
and half Manasseh occupied central Palestine, first 
Bethel and Shiloh, then Shechem, and finally all the 
country northward to the great plain of Esdraelon, 
i. e. y the ancient land of Joseph, whence they became 

1 This is confirmed by the mention in earlier Egyptian inscrip- 
tions of Asher as inhabiting that region. 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 43 

sons of Joseph, as Moab and Amnion became children 
of Lot. 1 Benjamin was born in the land, so the story 
tells us. His name means son of the south, he being 
the southern segment of the Rachelite tribes, and his 
mother was buried near Bethlehem. To these tribes 
of pure Aramaean stock, the children of Rachel, were 
added, as in the case of the other branch of Israel, 
the children of Leah, two Canaanite tribes, i. e., 
Canaanite peoples who accepted the religion of the 
God of Israel and so became part of Israel. One of 
these was Dan, whose name, as well as the name of 
his great hero, Samson, or sun man, indicates that the 
tribe had originally worshipped the Sun-god, just as 
the tribe of Gad had worshipped the god of Fortune. 
Dan represents the farthest extension southwestward 
of the Josephites. He dwelt on the border of the Phil- 
istine plain, and his principal town was Beth Shemesh, 
House of the Sun-god. Here the Danites were exposed 
to the onslaughts of the Philistines, by whom they 
were ultimately dispossessed. Then they removed to 
the extreme north, as we are told in Judges, and made 
a new settlement just beneath Mount Hermon, where 
they established the temple of Dan, with the descend- 
ants of Moses as its priests. In that same region, and 
southward on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, lay also 
the other tribe of Canaanite descent, which was ab- 
sorbed in the children of Rachel, namely Naphtali. 

1 Israel, on the other hand, was identified with Jacob, and 
Jacob was made son and grandson of Isaac and Abraham respec- 
tively; all of these being methods of recounting tribal and na- 
tional history and connections which may be paralleled from many 
sources. 



44 Bible and Spade 

But to return to that with which I began, and which 
is the real topic of this lecture, the race history of the 
Hebrews and the site of the Aramaean homeland: He- 
brew tradition, as represented by the story of the re- 
lation of the patriarchs to Mesopotamia; as represented 
by that ancient liturgy of Shechem contained in the 
book of Deuteromomy, which commences: "A wan- 
dering Aramaean was my father " (26 : 5) ; as repre- 
sented in the prophecies of Amos, who speaks of Kir as 
the homeland of Israel; as represented by those early 
traditions contained in the location of Eden, in the 
location of the resting-place of the Ark and the home of 
Noah; as represented by the genealogies of Genesis — 
Hebrew tradition as represented by all of these, points 
to the region which we now know as Armenia, by the 
sources of the Tigris and Euphrates, and southward 
from that down the western slopes of the Persian 
mountains, as the homeland of Israel's first ancestors, 
and it also points to an Aramaean origin for the He- 
brew. 1 

1 As we know the Hebrews, however, they did not speak Ara- 
maean but Amorite, a dialect identical with that of the Canaanites 
and close of kin to Phoenician. They and the kindred Khabiru 
peoples were profoundly affected by the Canaanites, a related 
people, but one vastly more advanced in civilization and culture, 
and, a common phenomenon in similar circumstances the world 
over, dropped Aramaean and adopted Canaanite, modified, 
however, by their Hebrew origin. That is the language which 
we know as Hebrew. Much later, long after the Exile, when 
Aramaean had become the lingua Franca of western Asia, the 
Hebrews with all the neighboring peoples dropped what had 
by that time become their native tongue, once more reverting 
to Aramaean. So some of the later parts of the Old Testament 
are written in Aramaean (frequently translated Syrian, and in the 
King James* version of Daniel Chaldean), which was also the 
language of Palestine in the time of Christ. 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 45 

Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions confirm the 
Armenian origin of the Aramaeans. They are first 
named in the latter centuries of the second millen- 
nium, appearing on the scene as a part of that great 
upheaval of which I have spoken as occurring then. 
These inscriptions represent them as pressing down on 
both Assyria and Babylonia, from the mountainous 
regions to the northwest, north and east of Assyria. 
Shortly we find them in possession of Mesopotamia 
and pouring into northern Syria. This movement 
downward from Syria to the Persian mountains with, 
apparently, Armenia as its centre, continues for the 
next 600 years or more. The annals of the Assyrian 
king, Ashur-nazir-pal, give us very full information 
with regard to the Aramaean states in his day, the first 
half of the ninth century. Asianic hordes of some 
description were at that time pushing into Armenia, 
unsettling the Aramaean populations there and forc- 
ing them southward. Ashur-nazir-pal conducts expe- 
dition after expedition against such Aramaean peoples, 
who were invading Assyrian territory, the Aramaean 
states which he mentions in his annals extending be- 
yond Diarbekir to the northwest in Asia Minor. Two 
centuries later, in Ashur-bani-paPs reign, the Aramae- 
ans, moving downward on the edge of the Persian 
mountains, have pushed well southward into Baby- 
lonia and joined hands with Elam. At that time they 
occupied all northern Syria and the country east and 
southeast of Palestine, well into northwestern Arabia, 
and their language had become the lingua Franca from 
the Mediterranean to the Persian mountains. 



46 Bible and Spade^ 

We find one further argument in support of the 
correctness of the old Hebrew tradition of the home- 
land of their Aramaean ancestors in the ethnological 
traits of the modern Armenians, While the Armenian 
language belongs to the Indo-European family of 
languages, the same is not true of the Armenian peo- 
ple. It requires no great observation to determine 
from their physical characteristics and appearances 
that the Armenian and the Jew are very closely re- 
lated to one another. In fact, it requires considerable 
discrimination to distinguish one from the other. It 
is true that one notices in both peoples, Armenian and 
Jew, many dissimilar individuals. Among the Ar- 
menians with whom I was thrown in contact in Asia, 
I noted occasionally persons of distinctly Indo-Euro- 
pean type, and others who were Tatar-Mongolian in 
form and feature, but the typical Armenian was 
scarcely distinguishable from the typical Jew, and 
both presented the same characteristics which are 
apparent in Assyrian sculpture. Indeed, those sculp- 
tures might very well pass for representations either of 
the Jew or of the Armenian of to-day, of which I have 
had some curious illustrations in actual experience. 
Also I have been interested and amused to observe 
that while Arabs could detect a Jew or an Armenian 
as not being an Arab merely from his physical appear- 
ance, they could not discriminate between Armenian 
and Jew any more than I. Moreover, not only are the 
Armenians and Jews alike in appearance, but the like- 
ness between them in mental and moral attributes and 
in a curious race persistence has been commented upon 



The Ancestry of the Hebrews 47 

by most observers.^ Armenia has been overrun and 
invaded from the earliest time of which we have any 
knowledge by peoples of all races and nationalities, 
but apparently that has happened there which has 
happened in some other regions: the underlying race, 
although conquered and assimilated by its conquerors, 
so far as language or even religion and civilization are 
concerned, has retained through all its primitive type 
and has indeed absorbed into itself its conquerors. 

The evidence at present in hand indicates Asia 
Minor, including Armenia, or Asia Minor and the 
country south of it from the Taurus mountains to the 
Euphrates, as the homeland of the northern Semites. 
To the west were the Amorites, who first reached civi- 
lization in northern Babylonia and Syria, and from 
whom ultimately were descended the Semitic Baby- 
lonians and Assyrians, the Phoenicians and the Canaan- 
ites. The Aramaeans, to whom belonged the Hebrews, 
occupying originally, apparently, a region somewhat 
farther toward the east, reached civilization later than 
the Amorites. Pushed out by invasions from behind, 
they poured down into Babylonia and Assyria, where, 
however, they were absorbed in the dominant As- 
syrian-Babylonian civilization, while more to the west, 
in Mesopotamia and Syria, they overwhelmed that 
civilization, establishing kingdoms and empires of 
their own, ultimately their language becoming the 
language of international intercourse over all hither 
Asia north of the Arab peninsula. 



n 

COSMOGONY AND FOLK-LORE 

In the previous lecture we were concerned with 
Hebrew legends. From the legendary lore contained 
in Genesis and Exodus, with occasional references 
and allusions in later books of the Old Testament, 
illuminated by discoveries in Egypt and Palestine, 
Asia Minor, Assyria, and Babylonia, we determined 
the ancestry of the Hebrews, and traced the prenatal 
growth of Israel from its wombland in the distant 
Aramaean-Armenian northeast, carried into and through 
Mesopotamia to Palestine and then to Egypt; its re- 
lations to the older Amorite stock in both of those 
lands; its friendly reception in the latter under the 
eighteenth dynasty and the favorable influence upon 
it of the Egypt of Ikhnaton, followed by the oppression 
under the nineteenth dynasty; and in part the process 
of birth by which it became a nation of twelve tribes 
occupying Canaan, with a new religion in its heart. 
The theme of the present lecture is the origin and 
development of the characteristic ideas of Israel, its 
mythology, including cosmogony, its folk-lore, and its 
institutions. The legends of a people are the tra- 
ditions of its primitive history, told generally in the 
form of personal narratives; its mythology is its inter- 
pretation of natural phenomena, of the universe and 

48 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 49 

its part in the same, also in the form, as a rule, of 
personal narratives; so that to some extent legend 
and myth overlap, and a given narrative may combine 
both myth and legend. The personal narratives of 
the acts of the gods or of God, the intercourse of the 
sons of the gods with the daughters of men, God walk- 
ing and talking with Adam and Eve in Eden, the temp- 
tation of mankind by the Serpent, the pictures of crea- 
tion, are clearly mythology; the narratives of Abra- 
ham, Jacob, and even Moses combine or may combine 
both legend and myth, the tradition of historical 
events, and the explanation of the forces behind those 
events, both in the form of personal narrative, man and 
God walking and talking and acting together. Legend 
tells the ancestry, migrations, race relations, struggles, 
and conquests of a people; mythology reveals the ori- 
gin and development of its ideas; the understanding 
of the one is essential to the understanding of its 
primitive history on its external side, of the other to 
its religious, moral, and mental development. 

It was in the year 1872 that a young Englishman, 
George Smith, curator in the Assyrian-Babylonian 
section of the British Museum, found a fragment of a 
clay tablet from ancient Nineveh which contained a 
record strikingly similar to the story of the Flood as 
found in the sixth and following chapters of Genesis. 
The publication of this discovery aroused enormous 
interest, and the editor of one of the London papers, 
The Telegraph, contributed a thousand pounds to send 
Smith out to Assyria to search for further remains 
of a similar character. The fragment which he had 



50 Bible and Spade 

found proved to be part of the eleventh book of a sort 
of epic liturgy, containing a Sun myth in twelve cantos, 
with historical legends and traditions interwoven. 
Fragments of the other cantos were ultimately re- 
covered and pieced together, so that in a general way 
we now know the contents of the whole myth. This 
was the beginning of the discovery of numerous Baby- 
lonian parallels to the stories contained in the first 
volume of Genesis (chaps. 1-11), which led ultimately 
to the development of a school of students who came 
to be called Babylonians, because they referred about 
everything in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, to 
some Babylonian source. When one considers the 
contents of this first volume of Genesis in connection 
with what has now been found in old Babylonian 
documents, one is not altogether surprised at the ex- 
treme to which these Babylonians have driven their 
theory. 

Attention once called to it, even without going to 
the documents excavated in Babylonia and Assyria, 
one notices to what extent those earlier chapters of 
Genesis are full of Babylonian references and allusions. 
Take, for instance, the second chapter, the one which 
we designated as the chapter of the preparation of the 
world. In this story the existence of the world it- 
self is assumed, but it was a dry and barren waste. 
The conditions of creation here described are entirely 
unlike those which we find in the Babylonian myths 
or legends. The mise en scene is derived from a dry 
land like southern Palestine, or even the still drier 
country southward, where Israel consorted with the Ke- 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 51 

nites. Nevertheless, we soon find a point of contact 
with Babylonia. We meet the Babylonian rivers, 
Tigris and Euphrates, springing from the great abyss 
of waters which lies beneath the Garden of Eden, and 
that divine garden at the source of those streams is 
part of the divine abode located, as in Babylonian 
mythology, in the mountains of the north. We find 
a further local reference in the mention of the ancient 
capital of Assyria, the city of Ashur, which lay on the 
river Tigris. This, like the race lists, contained in 
the tenth chapter of our present Genesis, which, as 
already pointed out, connect themselves with this same 
region, shows traditional connection of the Hebrew 
ancestors with the country northward and eastward of 
Assyria, and I attempted in the former lecture to show 
why that was the case, viz., that the Aramaean fore- 
fathers of .' m the Hebrews originated in that country, 
whence they brought with them certain myths and 
legends. 1 Possibly this fact may throw light, also, on 
some of the other likenesses between the Hebrew 
stories and the Babylonian, which I propose to note 
in the present lecture. 

In the flood story, chapters 6-9 of our present book 
of Genesis, modern Bible students have pointed out 
that two different documents are combined to form 
our present narrative. Both of these are similar to 

1 If the creation myth of Gen. 2 was a part of this older good, 
or even if it originated in the second Hebrew homeland of Mesopo- 
tamia, we have an explanation both of the dry land mise en sc&ne 
and of the local references to the Tigris, Euphrates, and Assyria. 
If, as has been maintained, it was of Canaanite or Sinaitic origin, 
those references are most difficult of explanation. 



52 Bible and Spade 

the flood story which George Smith discovered in the 
clay tablet in the library of Ashur-bani-pal in Nine- 
veh, but one represents conditions similar to those of 
Babylonia, inundations and not merely rain causing 
the flood; the other represents the conditions of a hill 
or mountainous country, where water comes from 
heaven only, and not from river inundations. Both 
agree, however, in connecting the flood with the region 
northeastward of Assyria, the same region to which 
may belong the dry land cosmogony of Gen. 2, and 
where also was located Eden. Both show connection 
with the regions and the ideas of the Babylonian civ- 
ilization. Only one, however, seems to show a close 
relation to the actual written story found in Baby- 
lonia. 1 When we turn to the story of creation, we find 
the same thing. There are two cosmogonies, the one 
a lengthy and detailed cosmogony, comprising the first 
chapter of Genesis and the first three verses of the 
second chapter; the second, quite dissimilar, a briefer 
folk-story, contained in chapter two, the chapter of 
the preparation, to which I referred in the previous 
lecture. I want first to call your attention to the rela- 
tion of this longer Hebrew cosmogony to the Baby- 
lonian. 

Some years since, I was asked to write, for Hasting's 
Encyclopedia of Religion, an article on Hebrew cosmog- 
ony. I supposed that I knew thoroughly the first 



1 This is the document commonly known as P, longer, more 
precise and schematic, later than J, which is shorter, simpler 
folk-lore. There is precisely the same difference between the 
two cosmogonies, P of Gen. 1, and J of Gen. 2. 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 53 

chapter of Genesis. The first Hebrew that I ever 
learned was that chapter, and to this day I can recite 
from memory the Hebrew of its first few verses, one 
of the most familiar parts of the whole Bible, the trans- 
lation of which into English is doubtless equally fa- 
miliar to you. Now, where a thing is so familiar, it 
is frequently the case that we accept the tradition 
which has come down without investigation. It seems 
to us an axiom, and so the translation of the first few 
verses of the first chapter of Genesis was, I suppose, 
axiomatic to my mind. It had never occurred to me 
that there could be any mistake about that. When, 
however, I began to use those verses for critical pur- 
poses, I was quickly brought face to face with the fact 
that the translation ordinarily accepted could not 
possibly stand. 

This was the passage on which my studies came to 
grief: "The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the 
waters." (In the American Standard Revision, as in 
the King James translation, " Spirit" is printed with 
a capital letter; in the English Revised Version, with a 
small letter.) This translation of the American re- 
visers goes back through Christian tradition to late 
Jewish tradition, but every commentator, American 
or English, who has expounded the passage, has also 
called attention to the fact that there is no other 
passage in the Old Testament where the words ren- 
dered Spirit of God have such a meaning. That gave 
me pause; but the very next word, "moved upon," 
or as the English Revised Version has it, "brooding 
over/ 3 aroused still greater questioning. I began to 



54 Bible and Spade 

ask myself what I had before me. The' "brooding 
over" of the English Revised gave expression to the 
common view in commentaries as to the interpretation 
of the passage. It suggested the "spirit of God," 
without a capital, as brooding over the world egg, 
such a view of the creation of the world as you find in 
the Indian cosmogonies. There is, however, no men- 
tion of an egg here, and there is no slightest allusion 
to anything being brought out of an egg. Moreover, 
nowhere else in the Bible, or in Hebrew literature or 
tradition, can there be found any evidence of the exis- 
tence among the Hebrews of such an idea. I began 
to ask myself: "What then does this passage mean, 
which I supposed I knew how to translate and of 
which I thought I understood the meaning?" I 
looked up the word translated "moved upon" or 
"brooded over." I found that it was used in only two 
other places in the Bible (Deut. 32 : 11 and Jer. 23: 9), 
and in the same form, mood or tense in which it appears 
in Gen. 1:2, in only one other place (Deut. 32:11). 
I found that a comparison of the kindred languages 
gave no certainty as to the meaning of the root. That 
it connoted some form of motion was clear, but what? 
Turning to the ancient translations, I found that they 
were equally in the dark. Their renderings were 
vague or uncertain. In the passage in Jeremiah in 
which the root occurred, it seemed to mean a violent 
shaking, as of a man in the ague of fright, but that 
was not altogether certain. Some translators supposed 
it to mean, not the shaking of the bones, but the 
dissolving of the bones through becoming absolutely 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 55 

powerless with fear/ The other passage in which the 
word appears is that beautiful verse in the song of 
Moses, where the poet describes an eagle in her nest 
and her dealing with her young: 

"As an eagle that stirreth up her nest, 
That fiuttereth over her young, 
He spread abroad his wings, he took them, 
He bore them on his pinions." * 

Here the word is translated in all three versions, the 
Accepted, and both the English and American Revised, 
as "fiuttereth over." As I read that passage, it seemed 
to me that I had an eye-witness picture of the way 
in which the eagle, or rather the griffon or rock vulture, 
for I suppose that is the bird actually referred to, 
deals with her young; and that if I could get from some 
naturalist an exact description of this I should probably 
get the correct meaning of the word in Genesis also. 
For some years I pestered distinguished ornithologists 
in this country and abroad, with unsatisfactory re- 
sults. Some of the most distinguished informed me 
that what professed to be described here was absolutely 
impossible and quite contrary to nature. Our passage 
says that the eagle spreads abroad his wings and takes 
and bears his young on his pinions. They assured me 
that no bird could possibly do this, and some of them 
told me that eagles and, in fact no birds, ever teach 
their young to fly, that birds fly by nature. Only one 
ornithologist said to me: "The fact of the matter is, 
we do not know anything about it. If you had asked 
1 Translation of the American Standard Revision. 



56 Bible and Spade 

me anything else about eagles, I think I could have 
told you, but when you asked me this question and I 
came to look it up, I found that we had absolutely no 
evidence or record on the subject." In the meantime, 
my own experience with some birds told me that, so 
far, at least, as the "stirring up" of the nest was con- 
cerned, it was a very frequent thing for robins, pigeons, 
ravens, and other small birds to force backward young 
ones out of the nest. Most birds fly by themselves 
by nature, but now and then there is one that will 
not do so. You may have seen occasionally a young 
robin on the ground or on a shrub or the lower branches 
of a tree, with the old birds flying about and making 
rushes at it. That young bird had not flown with the 
others and they had pushed it out of the nest. When 
a bird is pushed out of the nest, it generally takes to 
the wing, but some do not and those that you see on 
the ground are those which do not. Then the old 
birds make every effort to persuade or force them into 
flight, chiding them, coaxing them, rushing at them, 
and even striking them. I found also one record in 
commentaries on this passage w T hich described two 
eagles in Scotland teaching their young to fly. They 
were ascending in spirals, and at intervals one eagle 
would drop underneath the eaglet and support it on its 
wings for a brief space, apparently to rest it, then drop 
out and ascend once more; but I could not verify the 
record. 1 Later I obtained from a reliable eye-wit- 

1 Apparently, one commentator copied this with some varia- 
tion from another, no one, however, giving the original source. 
A similar incident was recorded with frills in a work of Doctor 
Long, but I was assured that he was a " nature faker." 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 57 

ness, Doctor Talcott Williams, of Columbia University, 
an account of similar action on the part of storks, as 
also of their w stirring up" their nests. In his boy- 
hood, he had lived near Mosul in Turkey, close to the 
minaret of a ruined mosque, which was inhabited by a 
colony of storks. Every spring they flew north, but 
before the northward flight began there was the very 
interesting process of schooling backward storks to 
fly. There was always a certain number of young 
storks in the colony which would not or could not 
take wing. These the older birds had to drive out of 
the nest and teach to fly before the colony could start 
on its annual migration. The long-legged young 
storks, squawking loudly and awkwardly sprawling all 
over the nest, would resist with all their might the 
efforts of their parents to eject them. When at last 
the older ones succeeded in pushing them out, most of 
them took to flight with proper motions of their wings, 
but some would drop down, more or less inert or with 
futile flappings. These older storks, flying beneath, 
would catch on their pinions. Occasionally one would 
fall between, strike the ground, and be killed. In 
general, however, some stork beneath would succeed 
in catching the falling youngster, and act as a support 
for him to take off again until at last he had him on 
the wing. 

But before I received this information about the 
habits of storks, there came to me evidence with regard 
to the eagles in our Rocky Mountains. In a mission- 
ary paper, The Spirit of Missions, I saw a reproduc- 
tion of a photograph of an eagle's nest with young 



58 Bible and Spade 

eagles in it on the edge of a wild cliff. It seemed to 
me that whoever had photographed that might also 
have been able to observe the dealings of the old eagle 
with its young. I therefore wrote to Bishop Nathaniel 
Thomas, of Wyoming, in whose jurisdiction the sta- 
tion lay in which the photograph had been taken, 
told him what I was doing and asked him to put me in 
touch with the person who had taken that photograph. 
He did better. He multiplied my letter and sent 
it, with one of his own, to stations up and down the 
Rocky Mountains, and then the information came 
pouring in. The passage in Deuteronomy is written 
by one who knew what he was talking about and who 
had seen it himself. My correspondents told me of 
the occasional young eagle, which they had seen, who 
would not fly; of the "stirring up" of the nest, to use 
the words in our English Bible, which means that the 
parents pushed it out of the nest; of the occasional 
young eagle thus ejected who would slope down on 
to some crag in the cliff and stay there, refusing to 
fly farther; of the way the parent birds would bring 
tempting tidbits, birds, rabbits, pieces of meat, hold- 
ing them off from it that it might fly out to get them; 
or how they would rush down on the young eagle to 
strike it if necessary and drive it from its perch and 
make it fly. Then, after it had taken to the wing, 
perhaps the young bird would lose its strength or its 
head and start to fall to the ground, but one or the 
other of the parent birds would always be flying be- 
neath to catch it on its pinions and bear it up until 
it was ready to take off again. This made clear the 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 59 

meaning of the word used in the passages in Deuter- 
onomy and Genesis, nor could there be further doubt 
about the meaning of the form from the same root used 
in Jeremiah. The latter means a violent shaking, as 
in fear, not a dissolving of the bones; and in the other 
two passages the motion described is a rushing onset, 
a violent motion, not a brooding or fluttering. This 
translation harmonizes also with the normal and 
proper meaning of the word translated " spirit." 

Verses 1 and 2 describe the preparation out of chaos 
of a world entity in which creation may operate. When 
God came in the very beginning of things to create 
the world he found chaos — the earth "waste and void" 
and Tehom hidden in the darkness. Now the word 
"Tehom," rendered "deep" in our Bible translation, 
is identical with the Babylonian Tiamat or Tiamtu, 
the monster of chaos, and in the Hebrew, as in the 
Babylonian, it is a proper rather than a common noun. 
The peculiar words tohu and bohu in our Hebrew text, 
rendered "waste" and "void," are also identical with 
words used in the Babylonian cosmogony. Against 
this monster, chaos or Tehom, lurking in the darkness 
of that "waste and void," which was in the place 
where earth was to be, "rushed the wind of God." 
Such is literally the statement contained in the first 
two verses of the book of Genesis. Now compare 
with this in the Babylonian cosmogony the victory 
of Merodach or Marduk over Tiamat and his creation 
out of her carcass of heaven and earth. Tiamat or 
chaos was the mother of all things, from whom through 
aeons of propagation came ultimately the gods. She 



60 Bible and Spade 

was also the mother of hideous monsters, serpents, 
and dragons, which peopled the waste and void. These 
were her special and characteristic progeny, and be- 
tween her and them and the gods was war. But the 
gods could make no head against them, and the great- 
est of the older gods recoiled in terror or retired dis- 
comfited from the conflict with Tiamat. Then Mar- 
duk of Babylon, of the younger generation of the gods, 
offered himself as their champion if they would own 
him lord of all. He made his face shine with light- 
ning — he filled his body with flashing fire, he devised 
a net to encompass Tiamat, and created the seven winds 
to trouble her. Then with the gods, his followers, he 
went forth to war against Tiamat and her horde of 
monsters. She screamed wrathfully, she made charms 
and uttered spells, but he was not dismayed, as the 
older gods had been, but met her in single combat. He 
encompassed her with his net to make her tangible, 
and when she opened to the utmost her huge devour- 
ing jaws, he loosed the winds and "made the blast 
rush into her, or ever she closed her lips. Raging 
gusts her belly filled, and her sense was taken away, 
and she opened wide her mouth. He thrust in his 
lance, rent her belly, tore open her inside, pierced the 
heart— destroyed her life. Her carcass he threw 
down, upon her he stood." Then he framed a wise 
device. "He rent her, like the body of a gazelle, in 
twain; the half of her he wrought and made heaven's 
dome," the other half constituting the earth. "He 
drew bolts, he stationed warders, charging them not 
to let the waters issue forth," the ocean beneath and 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 61 

the ocean above, for heaven and earth were counter- 
parts, to bring back the "waste and void." With 
Tiamat's fall her followers fled, but the greatest of 
them he captured and "shut up in prison," and the 
"mob of demons" he made subject. So Marduk, god 
of Babylon, became god of gods and lord of lords. 
"He formed a station for the great gods; stars, their 
likenesses, he stationed there. He appointed the year, 
dividing it into seasons; the twelve months — three 
stars for each he stationed." "The moon he made 
shine forth; made him overseer of light, to determine 
days." l 

The first two verses of Genesis tell of the same battle 
of God with chaos (Tiamat, Tehom), who is conquered 
by the same rushing wind, and out of whom is formed 
heaven and earth. The darkness of the waste and void 
is dispelled by the light from the brightness of God's 
presence (3). In the Hebrew cosmogony, as in the 
Babylonian, God surveys the world, dividing ocean 
from ocean in the two counterparts, heaven and earth, 
set one over against the other (6-8). So, also, the stars 
he sets "for signs, and for seasons," and makes the 
moon "to rule the night" (14-18). Neither does God 
in the Hebrew cosmogony destroy all the brood of the 
monsters of chaos, but some of them he lets live, 
imprisoned in the deep (21). As the Hebrew cos- 
mogony is in seven divisions, or days, so also the Baby- 
lonian cosmogony is divided into seven parts, or books, 
each written on a separate tablet. We are not, indeed, 
able to compare the two cosmogonies in all their de- 
1 Cf. for translations C. J. Ball, Light from the East. 



62 Bible and Spade 

tails, because these Babylonian tablets are fragmen- 
tary, but this much is clear: that the Hebrew cosmog- 
ony contained in Gen. 1 : 2-3 has somewhere behind 
it a source practically identical with this Babylonian 
cosmogony. 

I have called this cosmogony of the seven tablets 
Babylonian. The fragments which have come down 
to us were found in the library of the Assyrian king, 
Ashur-bani-pal, and were written in the seventh pre- 
Christian century. This text was itself, however, a 
copy from an older writing, manifestly belonging to 
the period when Babylon had gained the supremacy 
over the Sumerian cities of the south, and Marduk, 
god of Babylon, had become in consequence lord of all 
the gods. It is a Semitic cosmogony. We have also, 
however, fragments of Sumerian cosmogonies, in one 
of which Enlil, of Nippur, and in another Ea, of Eridu, 
plays the role of creator and victor over Chaos, here 
played by Marduk of Babylon. It is worthy of note 
that Chaos is threefold in the cosmogony of the seven 
tablets, really personified in two others, besides Tia- 
mat himself. These were her creatures or her off- 
spring. Apparently this is the result of a combination 
or conflation of cosmogonies from different sources. 
We have also an old cosmogony from Ashur, resembling 
in certain particulars the account of the preparation 
of the earth contained in Gen. 2, and we have other 
fragments of cosmogonies contained in various liturgies 
of different periods. Perhaps we may regard the cos- 
mogony of the seven tablets, the enuma-elis tablets, 
as they are called, as the official cosmogony of the 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 63 

priests or schoolmen of Babylon, part of an attempt to 
formulate and officially promulgate a religion of Mar- 
duk, somewhere about the time of Hammurapi, a little 
before 2000 B. C, the period when Babylon became the 
capital of a great empire, and the cult centre of a greater 
Semitic civilization extending from the Persian moun- 
tains to the Mediterranean Sea, and from central 
Asia Minor to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, com- 
bining, in one whole, Sumerian and Akkadian, i. e,, 
Semitic, elements. 

The cosmogony of the Seven Days, contained in 
Gen. 1, may be regarded similarly as the official cos- 
mogony of the Hebrew schoolmen, their final develop- 
ment of this same cosmogony in their post-exilic 
period. We can trace some of the steps of this develop- 
ment in the 104th Psalm and in Deutero-Isaiah. This 
Hebrew cosmogony in its final development, while 
unmistakably basing on the ancient mythology, has 
developed out of it a monotheistic, spiritual concep- 
tion, which we regard no longer as mythology, but as 
theology. The differences are greater than the re- 
semblances; the latter are in the material concept of 
the universe, the former in the concept of God and 
his relation to that universe. 

But the cosmogony of Gen. 1 is not the only Hebrew 
cosmogony showing kinship with the Babylonian cos- 
mogony of the seven tablets. We have various frag- 
ments of popular cosmogony appearing in Psalms, 
Prophets, and Wisdom which show cruder and more 
material resemblances to the Babylonian. In Psalm 
89, a liturgy from the temple of Dan of the eighth 



64 Bible and Spade 

century or earlier, Yahaweh not only defeats Rahab, 
here the leader of the anti-divine hosts, as Marduk 
defeated Tiamtu, but treats its carcass as carrion, just 
as Marduk insulted the corpse of Tiamtu. In a Psalm 
from the temple at Bethel (74) we have, as in the 
Babylonian cosmogony, the threefold representation 
of defeated Chaos, one of whose names is here Levia- 
than, and the same contumelious treatment of the 
defeated foe as in the Babylonian myth. In Job 27 
the heavens are made as in the Babylonian myth, 
and the threefold Chaos is called the Sea, Rahab, and 
the Fleeing Serpent. In Isaiah 27 the threefold cha- 
otic foe which Yahaweh, like Marduk, smites, is called 
Leviathan the Fleeing Serpent, Leviathan the Coiled 
Serpent, and the Dragon in the Sea; while in Isaiah 
51 it is Rahab, the Dragon, and Tehom. The names 
differ, but everywhere it is the same old story of the 
battle between God and his hosts and the Dragon 
and his hosts, especially his two great chiefs, with the 
slaughter of the Dragon and the contumelious treat- 
ment of his carcass, which is split in half and out of 
half the firmament of heaven made with its bolts and 
bars and pillars. The other monsters, which in Gen. 1 
are hidden in the seas, reappear in the Apocalypses, be- 
ginning with Daniel. In their eschatologies, or visions 
of the last days, which reflect the cosmogonies, or 
visions of the first days, these monsters are let loose 
from their pits and abysses to work destruction as at 
the beginning. So, in the book of Revelation, with 
its wonderful mystical picture of God's purpose with 
the world, we go back to the ancient monsters of prime- 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 65 

val chaos and their struggle with the gods to obtain 
our picture of Jesus' triumph over Satan, and the new 
creation. 

But it was not only the Hebrews whose cosmogony 
thus coincided with the Babylonian. In the fragments 
of Phoenician cosmogonies, which have been handed 
down through Greek sources, we find the same thing, 
with local variations and developments. Here the 
Babylonian Tiamtu (Hebrew Tehom) is Tauthe, 
while Bohu is Baau. Evidently this cosmogonic myth 
was common good of the west land. 

The history of the origin and development of the 
cosmogony of Gen. 1 seems, then, to have been as 
follows: The early Sumerian peoples of southern Baby- 
lonia developed in their different centres story-hymns 
of the creation of the world, colored by the local and 
climatic conditions of their land and their religion, 
of which those of Nippur and Eridu were most im- 
portant. Semitic peoples, pouring down from north 
and west, adopted the Sumerian myths and religion, 
including their cosmogonies, adapting them to their 
own religion, combining Semitic elements with Sume- 
rian. For the cosmogony this was done officially by 
the schoolmen of Babylon, when Babylon was the 
culture centre of western Asia, and, with local varia- 
tions and adaptations, this cosmogony of Babylon 
became the cosmogony of the west land, i. e. } of Syria 
and Palestine. This the Hebrews, of kindred stock, 
adopted, as they adopted the language of the country, 
adapting it to their religion; and as that religion be- 
came more and more spiritual, unfolding finally after 



66 Bible and Spade 

the Exile into a complete and exalted monotheism, 
this cosmogony was developed out of its grossness, its 
crudity, and its low polytheism into that magnificent 
picture with which the Bible opens, of one spiritual 
God, creating the world by his word. 

It is wonderful how out of the puerile, gross fancies 
of the primitive times, those which appear in the myths 
and legends of kindred peoples, the Hebrew thinkers 
developed so sane, so lofty, so spiritual a system of 
cosmogony and of theology. This is the glory of the 
Bible. I love to hunt out the ancient sources, to trace 
them down, to see what they are, and then, as it were, 
to discern the Spirit of God moving in them, for it 
was out of gross sensuality that a beautiful spirituality 
developed; out of crude materialism or the crassest 
anthropomorphism, a lofty ethical monotheism. It is 
as when one sees God's power working in natural life: 
out of the vile ordure of some bog bringing forth a 
plant whose flower is the most graceful, ethereal, 
spiritual thing that you will find in all nature. 

The third chapter of Genesis, the story of the temp- 
tation, is one of the most fascinating in its suggestions 
and connections in this whole volume of the book of 
Genesis. Old cylinders discovered in Babylonia and 
Assyria show us pictures of the tree and a serpent 
standing on its tail by the side of the tree. We have 
other strange pictures of genii with satchels in their 
hands, standing by the tree and holding out toward 
it some object, apparently for the artificial fertiliza- 
tion of the tree. 

It seems to be generally agreed that we have, in 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 67 

the Babylonian inscriptions, the equivalent of the 
Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, of which man 
did not eat. This is contained in a Babylonian in- 
scription found, oddly enough, in Egypt, in Tel el- 
Amarna. It is the story of Adapa, and seems to have 
been used by the scribes of the Egyptian foreign office 
for use in studying the Babylonian script and language. 
Adapa was a mighty man of Eridu, the old Sumerian 
city of the extreme south, who fished for Eridu. One 
day the Southwind capsized him and made him sink 
to the fishes, whereupon in his wrath he broke the 
Southwind's wing, and for seven days it could not 
blow. So Anu, lord of heaven, sent word to Ea, god 
of Eridu, to bring Adapa to his presence. Ea, afraid 
of a rival, warned Adapa not to eat of any food or 
drink which might be offered him there, he also clothed 
him in a mourning garment and gave him other treach- 
erous advice. The result was that Adapa refused the 
food of life and the water of life which Anu would have 
given him to eat and drink, and thus failed of the im- 
mortality the god would fain have bestowed upon him. 
This story relates, however, if at all, only to that 
tree of life of which Adam did not eat, but of which 
God 1 was afraid that, having acquired knowledge to 
procreate his kind, he might also eat and acquire im- 
mortality for himself and his descendants, becoming 
rival to divinity. The tree of life in the Hebrew story 
seems irrelevant and extraneous in its present form, 

1 Or gods. It is a very primitive and anthropomorphic story, 
and at times one hardly knows whether it is God or gods of which 
he is reading. 



68 Bible and Spade 

as though we had part of another story imbedded in 
the story of the temptation. In the Babylonian 
story of Adapa, on the other hand, there is nothing of 
the tree of knowledge, or of the serpent and the temp- 
tation which are the real substance of the Hebrew 
story. 

In latter years Babylonian scholars have succeeded, 
after a fashion, in translating some of the very old 
records discovered particularly at Nippur by the 
Babylonian expedition of the University of Pennsyl- 
vania. Several of these have been announced as 
descriptions of a Babylonian Garden of Eden, more or 
less parallel to the Hebrew account. In point of fact, 
they are liturgies 1 connected with an ancient lascivious 
cult, of the existence of which both in Babylonia and 
Canaan we have been finding increasing evidence from 
the excavations in those regions. In these old litur- 
gies the serpent is identified with the goddess. She 
is the river which as a serpent winds down to fertilize 
the land. The god is connected with the great terraces 
and towers and walls of the temples. Thence he looks 
down and sees the serpent goddess and is enticed, and 
so the land is fertilized. Such liturgies were sung in 
connection with the obscene ritual of the cult of fructi- 
fication, which was regarded as a birth of the fruits of 
the ground from the cohabitation of god and goddess. 
It was that old worship of the wonderful and mys- 
terious source of life. Now, when one turns to the 

1 The well-known Babylonian poem of "The Descent of Ishtar 
into Hades' ' is also a liturgy, and perhaps likewise the crea- 
tion story and other similar writings. 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 69 

Hebrew story of Eden and the fall of man, one sees at 
once that it is a sex story, but whereas in the Baby- 
lonian the sex relation is almost deified and is exalted 
into a licentious cult, the Hebrew reacts into an almost 
ascetic relation to sex, as a consequence of that lascivi- 
ous and obscene cult which had developed in connec- 
tion with this worship of the principle of life. It is 
when Adam and Eve are brought into union with one 
another that their understanding is awakened to know 
sin, and misery is brought into a hitherto happy, care- 
free world. When one studies the Israelite prophets 
and sees the conditions with which they were confronted 
in Canaan, how men and women inflamed their lust 
"under every green tree," he will understand why 
and how the moral sense of the religious leaders re- 
volted against the old mythology in this regard. With 
our present knowledge we can perceive the elements of 
connection between the Hebrew and Babylonian Edens, 
but even more striking than in the case of the creation 
story are the differences between the two accounts. 

In the fourth and fifth chapters of Genesis we have 
two lists of antediluvian heroes, who lived each for 
centuries. Both commence with Adam and end, the 
one with Lamech, the father of Noah, and the other 
with Noah. The one contains seven, or, adding Noah, 
eight names, the other ten. The former gives us 
stories or incidents in connection with some of the 
names, the latter, or longer list, is a mere skeleton of 
names. The former is folk-story, the latter scribal 
genealogy. Comparison shows that they are in origin 
the same, the apparently divergent names, Cain- 



^ 



70 Bible and Spade 

Cainan, Methushael- Methuselah, Irad-Jared, etc., 
being only variants of the same names. The history 
of Berossus, a Babylonian priest postdating Alexander 
the Great, fragments of which in the Greek have come 
down to us, has preserved for us a similar list of ten 
primeval kings of Babylon who ruled for aeons and 
whose names our present knowledge of the Babylonian 
language enables us to equate with those of the He- 
brew lists of antediluvian heroes; the equated names 
appearing, however, in forms which show that the ten 
heroes became common good of the Hebrew ancestors 
and of the Babylonians at a very early period. More 
recently there have been discovered among the old 
Sumerian texts from Nippur documents similar to 
those from which the lists contained in Berossus must 
ultimately have derived. 1 Placing the three lists side 
by side, we are able to see how these ten names, with 
certain notes concerning the deeds of their bearers, 
were translated from the Sumerian into the Babylonian 
Semitic tongue, and from that again transferred into 
Hebrew at a very early period, so early that the mean- 
ing of some of the names is not evident from classical 
Hebrew. 

So Amelon, a Greek corruption in Berossus's list, 
third name, for the Babylonian Amelu, man, equates 
with the Hebrew Enos, which may be described as 
archaic Hebrew for man. The fourth name, Amme- 
non, of Berossus, is clearly the Babylonian Ummanu, 

1 See Geo. A. Barton, Archceology and the Bible, Part D, chap- 
ter V. He was the first to discover the relation of these Sume- 
rian lists to those of Berossus. 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 71 

artificer. This equates with Cainan and Cain of the 
two Hebrew lists, which are the same name in variant 
forms. Neither Cain nor Cainan are in classical 
Hebrew true words with a meaning, but the Aramaean 
furnishes us with a word cainai, smith, identical in 
root and sound, which is in meaning the equivalent 
of the Babylonian ummanu. The seventh name of 
Berossus's list is Edorachus or Enedorankos, the 
Babylonian-Sumerian En-me-dur-an-ki, " interpreter 
of heaven and earth," of whom we are informed in 
Babylonian inscriptions as the holy priest of Sippara, 
the city of the Sun, and to whom was ascribed the origin 
of the guild of soothsayers, the interpreters of oracles 
and signs. To this corresponds Enoch of the He- 
brew, i. e., the anhi of En-me-dicr-an-lci, the former part 
of the long name being omitted (as in the Hebrew 
name Ahaz for Jehoahaz), the holy man, who "walked 
with God and he was not; for God took him" (Gen. 
5:24). This man of Sippara, city of the Sun, is 
followed by Amempsinos, evidently the Babylonian 
Amel-Sin, man of Sin, the Moon-god. This equates 
with the Hebrew Methusha-el or Methuselah, which 
means male or man of God. The last name of Berossus's 
list, Xisuthros, is the Ut-napishtim of the cuneiform 
inscriptions, the hero of the Flood. But Ut-napishtim 
may apparently be read also Nuh-napishtim, which 
is the Hebrew Noah, by the simple omission of the last 
element of the name. In similar fashion the Hebrew 
Seth stands for the Babylonian Shithu-Elu, by omis- 
sion of the divine suffix elu or Hit. 1 

1 For the other names in these lists, see Barton. 



72 Bible and Spade 

In these lists of antediluvian heroes, some of whom 
were also gods, Babylonian and Hebrew alike, we have 
civilization stories, attempts to account for the growth 
and development of civilization, the commencement 
of city building, the division of men into settler and 
nomad, the origin of musicians, metal workers, sooth- 
sayers, and interpreters of the oracles of God. In 
both is found a similar free treatment of names. Su- 
merian and Semitic Babylonian appear side by side in 
the one, and in the other classical Hebrew and archaic 
or Aramsean forms. Evidently in origin these creation 
legends were very early, going back in Babylonia to 
the primitive Sumerian civilization; and also they early 
became common good of the Semitic world, and so a 
heritage of the Hebrews from their forefathers, puri- 
fied, monotheized, and spiritualized, like all similar 
material. Ultimately they were incorporated in Gene- 
sis in two forms, the less complete but more discursive 
and more human folk-lore form in the fourth chapter 
of Genesis, and the schematically more complete list, 
of names and years only, contained in the fifth chapter. 

Of the intercourse of gods and men, the resulting 
wickedness of man, and of the Flood I have already 
spoken, and because the Hebrew and Babylonian 
parallels for the latter are so well known, I do not 
propose to dwell upon this further. Only here, as 
bearing on the question of the Arabian origin of the 
ancestors of the northern Semites, I would note that 
Arabic legend and folk-lore have no allusion to the 
Flood myth, which plays so large a part in the myth- 
ology of the northern Semites, connecting itself, as al- 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 73 

ready pointed out, with the region of Armenia. And 
the same is true in general of Babylonian and Hebrew 
mythology and folk-lore — they show connections with 
the north, but never with Arabia. 

I am not trying to give an exhaustive account of 
the sources of all the myths and stories contained in 
the eleven chapters of the first volume of Genesis, but 
am more particularly noting those things which I 
have myself found or observed, or which have become 
especially my own through study and observation. 
Let me skip, therefore, to the last chapter of this first 
volume of Genesis, to try to point out there an instance 
of a connection of another sort of early Hebrew story 
with Babylonia. In the eleventh chapter of Genesis 
we are told that the whole earth was " of one language 
and of one speech," or, to use the literal picturesqueness 
of the Hebrew, "of one lip and one word; and it came 
to pass, as they journeyed east, that they found a plain 
in the land of Shinar (i. e., Sumeria or Babylonia); 
and they dwelt there." Here we have the same con- 
nection, noted in the first lecture, of the ancestors of 
the Hebrews with the Aramaean folk of the country 
of that farther east. In the Assyrian inscriptions, as 
already pointed out, we find the Aramaeans for long 
centuries drifting downward from Armenia into As- 
syria and Babylonia. We find them settled on the 
western slopes of the Persian mountains, the Assyrians 
and Babylonians occupying the plain country. From 
these mountain settlements they continually made 
inroads on the inhabited and cultivated territory, the 
great Sumerian plain, and the Assyrians and Baby- 



74 ' Bible and Spade 

lonians were constantly engaged in conducting punitive 
expeditions against them. The Aramaean tradition 
represented in the Hebrew story connects their an- 
cestors with those lands. This story also reveals to 
him who reads a close connection with Babylonia, 
and yet, as I think you will see in a moment, it is not 
derived from Babylonia, it is not a story of the Baby- 
lonians, but of outsiders who knew that country and 
were profoundly affected by its monuments. 

We are told that the people on the Babylonian plain 
learned to make bricks and that they had bitumen for 
mortar. Those are striking peculiarities of the Baby- 
lonian region. Then, further, these people say to one 
another: "Come, let us build a city and a tower, its top 
unto heaven. Let us make a nation; that we may not 
be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." 
This is a picture of the development, as the ruder 
Aramaeans saw it, of that Babylonian civilization where 
men, ceasing to be nomads, built cities and towers. 
As for the towers, those were one of the most charac- 
teristic features of the great Babylonian cities and 
temples. We have discovered a number of them, 
square pyramids, built step-like, the highest seven 
stories; in the more common form, three stories in 
height. It was not every temple which had one of 
these towers, ziggurats, or pinnacles, as they were called, 
but there were enough of them to be in striking evi- 
dence all over the Babylonian plain, and their remains 
still stand, visible oftentimes almost a day's journey 
away, great masses of unburned brick, as a rule. The 
Hebrew story goes on to tell how the Lord came down 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 75 

to see the cities and towers which the children of men 
were building, and, after that old fashion which we 
find in almost all the old mythologies, God was jealous 
of men and more or less fearful of what they might do 
if they learned the secrets of divine power, and he 
says: "Behold, they are one people and they all have 
one language, and this is what they begin to do: and 
now nothing will be withholden from them which they 
purpose to do. Come, let us go down and confound 
their language that they may not understand one an- 
other's speech." So they were unable to continue their 
building j,nd were scattered abroad. And then the 
story goes on to tell that the name of that place in 
which the Lord confounded their language and scat- 
tered them was "called Babel, because the Lord did 
there confound the language of all the earth, and from 
thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the 
face of the earth." Here we have one of those char- 
acteristic folk etymologies, a play upon words, by which 
Babel is made in punning fashion to mean confusion. 
In Babylonian, Babel, our Babylon, really meant Gate 
of God. 

Babylon from about 2200 B. C. was the emporium 
and centre of religious life, of culture and of civiliza- 
tion for the whole of western Asia. It was a place 
where many races and many languages met, as con- 
fusing in its day as New York, Chicago, or Constanti- 
nople are in ours, a place where you could hear every 
known tongue. You would find there colonies of all 
sorts of people, just as you do in New York and 
Chicago to-day, so that in one place you would hear 



76 Bible and Spade 

only Elamite spoken, in another perhaps the old 
Sumerian tongue, which the priests were using in the 
temples as the church language, precisely as the Ro- 
man Church uses Latin to-day. I suppose you could 
have found quarters where Aramaic was spoken, quar- 
ters where Hittite was spoken, and much more. There 
was a confusion of tongues, and any one who has 
lived in New York or Chicago realizes the difficulties 
and general confusion growing out of this, and the 
resulting inefficiency and incompetency in certain di- 
rections, with their manifold perplexities. 

But what was this tower? The inclination has been 
to suppose that it was that great mass of unburned 
brick in Babylon itself which is known to-day as Babel; 
but that was never a ziggurat. Now, about eight miles 
south of Babylon, on the west side of the Euphrates — 
Babylon itself was astride the river — was the city of 
Borsippa, a sister city, ultimately almost a suburb, of 
Babylon. They lie so close together that the ordinary 
observer to-day almost inevitably confuses them; and 
they were most closely associated in the ancient time. 
In Babylon stood the great temple of Marduk, know r n 
as Esagila. In Borsippa stood the great temple of 
Nebo, known as Ezida. Apparently Borsippa was the 
older, and at the New Year's feast the procession went 
first to Borsippa, whence it returned, bringing the gods 
of Borsippa to pay homage to Marduk in his temple in 
Babylon, precisely as in Naples at the feast of Saint 
Januarius all the saints of all the other churches go 
in solemn procession, the monks bearing life-size silver 
images of their saints, fifty or more in number, to the 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 77 

Church of Santa Chiara. There these saints in the 
form of their silver statues make obeisance before the 
image of Santa Chiara at her altar, and are then car- 
ried out into the courtyard to spend the night as her 
guests. Only Saint Januarius, who comes in last, 
takes his position by Santa Chiara on her altar; and 
then takes place that marvellous ceremonial of the 
liquefaction of the blood of Saint Januarius. The fol- 
lowing day the great procession returns, with Saint 
Januarius and Santa Chiara together at the rear, to the 
Cathedral, Saint Januarius' s church, where the festival 
of the liquefaction continues for a week. This is be- 
cause the worship of Santa Chiara is the older of the 
two. 

Now, the most striking ruin in all Babylonia at the 
present day is the ziggurat, or stage tower of this 
temple of Nebo at Borsippa. In the form in which it 
has come down to us this is a construction of the great 
Nebuchadrezzar. Unlike the ordinary ziggurat with 
which we are familiar, every stage of this was faced 
with kiln-burned bricks laid in bitumen, the core of 
the structure consisting of sun-dried bricks. How so 
solid a mass was destroyed, we do not know. It looks 
to-day as though it had been blasted by a stroke from 
the lightning of God. Whatever the catastrophe was 
which destroyed it, the bricks which faced this tower, 
which were glazed, each stage having a different color, 
were run into one whole at that catastrophe, the glaze 
fusing the bricks together, so that they constitute 
to-day one great mass, split and riven above, as though 
by a thunder-bolt, but so solid that only blasting can 



78 Bible and Spade 

disintegrate it. We have Nebuchadrezzar's own ac- 
count of how he happened to repair and rebuild this 
ziggurat, and from that account we learn that long 
before his day it was the most conspicuous monument 
of all that region, and also that, enormous as it was 
when he found it, it was a work only partly completed, 
which had been begun and never finished. Here is 
part of that account, contained in the clay cylinders 
which he placed as foundation documents in the 
corners of this ziggurat when he rebuilt it. First he 
tells how Marduk guided him to repair this monument 
of his cousin god, Nebo, how, "At that time the house 
of the seven divisions of heaven and earth," which, I 
suppose, refers to the seven stages of the tower of the 
temple, "the ziggurat of Borsippa, which a former king 
had built and carried up to the height of forty-two 
yards, but the summit of which he had not erected, 
was long since fallen into decay." The conduits, which 
should have carried off the water, "had become use- 
less; rain-storms and tempests had penetrated its un- 
baked brickwork; the bricks which cased it were bulged 
out; the unbaked bricks," which constituted the core, 
"were converted into rubbish heaps." This was the 
condition of this monument, a very old one, even the 
name of the builder of which had been forgotten, which 
Marduk moved Nebuchadrezzar's heart to rebuild. 
He built it of the same size, he did not change its place 
or its foundation. He built it "as in former times," 
that is, he carried out the original plan to make it an 
enormous ziggurat, overtopping everything else, and 
he raised it to the height which had been planned. It 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 79 

was that mysterious and wonderful ruin of a hoar 
antiquity, which long antedated Nebuchadrezzar, look- 
ing as though man had sought to climb up to heaven 
by its steps, and which had never been completed, 
which gave rise to the idea of the interference of God. 
There is the physical original of the story of the tower 
of Babel. There is also the testimony to the ancient 
belief that Babylon was the centre from which the 
civilization of western Asia took its origin. - 

And now let me take up one thing in the second 
volume of this book, in the story of Abram, or, as we 
more commonly call him, Abraham. 1 That is a name 
of the same form which we find in the Babylonian rec- 
ords of the period about 2200 B. C. in Babylonia. 
We find there, also, the names Jacob and Joseph, 
sometimes with the divine name added, Jacob-el and 
Joseph-el, and sometimes without. About 2500 B. C, 
or a little after that, there seems to have been a great 
pouring in of peoples from the west, the land which 
the Babylonians always called Amurru, or west land, 
whom we meet in the Bible as Amorites. They were 
a Semitic people, differing from the Aramaeans, to 
whom the Hebrews belonged, as the French differ 
from the Italians or from the Spanish, all going back 
in their language to the same Latin stock, but speak- 
ing tongues differently modified out of the Latin. 
The Amorites and the Aramaeans spoke Semitic tongues, 
but variant one from another. Those were the days 
before the Aramaeans had appeared on the scene. 
They were still in their ancient homeland to the north- 

1 This name also occurs in these two forms in Babylonian. 



80 Bible and Spade 

ward. I suggested in my last lecture, from the ap- 
pearance in Egyptian inscriptions of the names Jacob-el 
and Joseph-el as inhabitants of Canaan, that the 
Egyptians had found similar Amorite Semitic peoples 
inhabiting central Palestine, whose traditions later 
the Hebrews, occupying the land, took over with their 
old shrines; exactly the same sort of thing that took 
place when Christianity conquered heathen Europe. 
Now in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis we have a 
most perplexing story. It is different as a piece of 
writing from anything about it, as though the author 
of Genesis had derived the record of this story from a 
source different from that from which he drew the 
other records or stories of this volume. It tells of 
Abram in Palestine, at Hebron, and of Lot in the Jor- 
dan valley, who, as we know from the Egyptian in- 
scriptions, was the earlier population of that land, as of 
the land later occupied by the Moabites and Ammon- 
ites, who hence came to be called the children of Lot. 
It tells further about the invasion of that country by 
a certain Elamite king named Chedorlaomar, which is 
a perfectly good Elamite name, although we have not 
yet certainly identified such a king. It tells us of 
strange ancient peoples who were in Canaan at that 
time, of whose existence we have learned in later days 
through excavations, and it tells us that what is here 
narrated took place in the days of Amraphel, King of 
Shinar, which we call, from Babylonian records, Sumer 
or Sumeria. Now we know this Amraphel. He was 
the great king of Babylon, who a little before 2000 
B. C. made Babylon the capital of all Babylonia or 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 81 

Sumeria, and established a mighty empire. He was 
the founder of the greatness of Babylonia, and in rela- 
tion to the Babylonian empire he played very much the 
same part which Alfred the Great did in making Eng- 
land a nation. In the capital of Elam there was dis- 
covered, nineteen years ago, a vast stele or monument, 
erected originally by this same Amraphel, or, to give 
him his Babylonian name, Hammurapi, containing the 
code of laws which he ordained and published for his 
country. As Moses is represented in the Bible as 
receiving the law for Israel from God, so on this stele 
Hammurapi is represented as receiving these laws from 
the Sun-god, who in Egypt and Babylonia, and we 
might say in general, was the god of law. 

These laws of Hammurapi are frequently represented 
as the original of the Hebrew laws, or at least of that 
earliest code of Hebrew laws which we find in Exodus, 
chapters 20-23. Let me briefly analyze Hammurapi's 
code. It is headed by five laws dealing with the ad- 
ministration of justice. In these we find the same 
general principle which we find in the Hebrew laws, 
that if any man bring an accusation against another 
and it turn out to be false, he is to suffer the punish- 
ment which he attempted to inflict upon the other. 
There are two things to which we have no parallel in 
the Hebrew laws; one is the test or ordeal, in this case 
by water. 1 The accused may prove his innocence by 
casting himself into the God River. If he sink, it is 
proof that he is guilty, if he escape, he is innocent, and 

1 In Hebrew the ordeal appears only in the case of a wife 
suspected by her husband of adultery (Num. 5). 



82 Bible and Spade 

the code ends with the provision that if a judge through 
bribery, or wilful malice — his own fault, the code says — 
give a decision contrary to the facts, he shall, on the 
reversal of that decision, pay twelve times the fine 
levied by him, be removed from the bench, and be in- 
eligible for further judicial service. 

Then follows a series of laws, 6-25, dealing with 
theft, direct or constructive. They are more humane 
than the corresponding Hebrew laws, substituting fine 
or lesser amputation where the Hebrew prescribes the 
death penalty. Only in the case of offenses against 
the higher classes, especially against temple or palace 
officers, the punishment is death. These laws reveal 
a condition of society very different from that which 
the Hebrew laws show, both in the development of 
classes of society and also in the picture they give of 
trade, of the stability of institutions and the like, 
and especially in the development of slavery, about 
one-half of the laws covering theft dealing with slavery. 
As illustrative of stability of institutions and of ex- 
tended commercial relations, the person accused is 
allowed six months in which to get witnesses. The 
evidence of extended commercial relations contained 
in these laws is confirmed also by the records contained 
in Babylonian tablets of the same period, where, for 
instance, an owner who rents a cart provides that that 
cart is not to be used for driving from Babylonia to 
the Mediterranean Sea. In case of highway robbery 
the laws of Hammurapi lay the burden of restitution 
on the community in which the robbery occurred, with 
a further penalty in case of loss of life in connection 
with the robbery. 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 83 

The next series of laws, 26-49, shows us certain pe- 
culiar social conditions growing out of military exigen- 
cies. It deals with the people to whom royal grants 
of land, houses, and the like were made, in return for, 
or in connection with, which they are bound to render 
a feudal service, which service could not be deputed. 
We have nothing in the slightest degree resembling 
this in the Hebrew laws, except only that in later He- 
brew legislation there is provision made for the inalien- 
ability of lands, for the purpose of preserving an owner, 
not a tenant, proprietorship, but that is a late develop- 
ment. In Babylon, about 2000 B. C, we find this 
inalienability prescribed for a different purpose, in 
connection with these feudal grants, the inalienability 
including, with the tenant, his cattle and sheep, as well 
as the land, so that, for instance, if a feudal tenant 
•were captured by the enemy and had no money to 
pay for the ransom, the temple of his town must pay 
it for him, or, failing that, the central or royal power. 
Then follows a series of laws concerning tillage of the 
ground, 42-65, reflecting the peculiar conditions of a 
country dependent upon the irrigation of the land, 
rather than the watering of the land from heaven. 
Also the developed condition of civilization in Baby- 
lonia is shown by the provisions for loans to farmers 
on the security of their fields, for a tenant receiving 
his share of the improvements in the case of redemp- 
tion of waste lands, and the like. The closing portion 
of this series of laws was erased by the Elamite con- 
queror who set the stele up in Susa, as also the com- 
mencement of the following series of laws dealing with 



84 Bible and Spade 

mercantile transactions. The Elamite king had in- 
tended to inscribe his name on the spot thus made 
bare, but failed to do so, and we do not know, there- 
fore, who it was that plundered Babylon and carried 
off this stele. 

Of the laws dealing with mercantile transactions only 
eight are left, 100-107, and here again we find a develop- 
ment far in advance of that represented anywhere in 
Hebrew law. Provision is made for goods intrusted 
to merchants to buy and sell in other towns or countries, 
a commission business, and it is further provided that 
receipts shall be given and taken; and if a person did 
not give or receive such a document written on a clay 
tablet, his claim for the return of goods or moneys 
alleged to be intrusted to another should be invalid. 

The next section, 108-111, deals with tavern-keepers, 
and to this we shall return in a moment. Then fol- 
lows a series of laws, 112-126, vastly in advance of 
the civilization represented in Palestine at any period 
covered by the codes of laws contained in the Penta- 
teuch. These are the laws dealing with banks and 
safe-deposit or storage companies. 

The longest series of laws, 127-195, deals with family 
relations, both marital and filial. In one regard, 
certainly, the position of woman is higher than in the 
Hebrew codes. She has property rights, separate 
from her husband, and if she can show maltreatment 
or desertion by him, she may secure a divorce. Highly 
advanced is the law that provides that if a man's 
wife becomes diseased he may not put her away, and 
although he may take in that case another wife, he 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 85 

must provide for the sick woman in his own house and 
support her as long as she lives. Accused of infidelity, 
a woman may claim the ordeal of water mentioned 
above. A false charge of infidelity against a woman is 
punished most severely. If in these regards a woman 
stands higher and is better protected than in Hebrew 
law, on the other hand, we find in this section laws 
about women dedicated to the service of the gods, a 
practice which, although actually existing in Israel 
until the Reformation under King Josiah in Judah in 
624 B. C, was never legalized or recognized, so far as 
we can judge by the Hebrew codes of laws which have 
come down to us. 

Then follows the section dealing with crimes of 
violence, 196-214, a development of the lex talionis, 
the fundamental principle of which is common not only 
to Babylonia and to the Hebrews, but practically to 
all the world, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for 
hand, burning for burning, wound for wound, stroke 
for stroke. But here we notice a greater development 
of classes among the Babylonians, and more excep- 
tions to the rule consequent upon difference of station. 
The laws governing the practice of medicine, or per- 
haps rather surgery, including not only the surgeon, 
but also the veterinary and barber, who, among other 
things, branded slaves, follow as a sort of development 
of the lex talionis. So, in the laws of surgery, 215- 
223, there is a fixed price for certain operations and 
treatments, but, on the other hand, if a physician kill 
a free man, or put out his eye in treating him, his 
hands are to be cut off; and somewhat similarly, the 



86 Bible and Spade 

veterinary is to be punished in case of injury to the 
animals he treats, 224-225. So likewise the barber, 
226-227, shall have his hand amputated in case of 
false branding, which is a species of manstealing. The 
laws covering building operations also, 228-233, are 
particularly concerned with the punishment to fall 
upon the builder in case the house he builds be badly 
built, the punishment being greater or less, according 
to the damage done, from the death of the builder 
down to compensation or repair. The ship-builder is 
treated in the same way, 234-235. Here we have also 
a regulation of prices, and indeed in all sections pro- 
visions are made determining the prices of services 
rendered, from doctors, builders, and contractors 
down to the commonest laborers. 

After the laws governing ship-builders came those 
dealing with the management of boats, the responsi- 
bility of sailors in case of wreck, etc., 236-240, and then, 
241-246, laws covering the hire and treatment of oxen 
and asses. These laws, while very different in other 
regards, and much more advanced than the Hebrew 
laws, give evidence, like the latter, of the existence in 
those days of dangerous wild beasts, especially lions. 
The provisions covering the case of the goring ox are 
practically the same as in ancient Hebrew law, Ex. 
21 : 28-32. In these laws, again, we have the provision 
of community responsibility, that in certain cases the 
community must make good theft or fraud or failure 
to fulfil a contract by one of its members. 

Then comes the series of laws, 247-277, regulating the 
wages of laborers and labor instruments of various de- 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 87 

scriptions, including the water-wheels and the systems 
for irrigating the land. Tillage of the ground and herd- 
ing of cattle play in the Babylonia of that day a promi- 
nent part, and next to them comes navigation. Farm- 
hands, herdsmen, and sailors are the principal laborers; 
all other workmen are included under one law, 274, 
which fixes the wages of the potter, tailor, carpenter, 
rope-maker, and mason. 

The concluding section of laws, 278-282, deals with 
slave-trade. Then follows an epilogue in which Ham- 
murapi endeavors to give sanction to his laws by all 
the powers of religion and superstition. Every possi- 
ble curse is to be visited on any one whosoever then, or 
in time to come, should change or interfere with these 
laws or their execution, precisely the same thing which 
we find at the end of the codes in Leviticus and Deu- 
teronomy. 

There are two laws or series of laws in this code which 
threw a very interesting light on passages in the Bible, 
laws which have, however, no correspondents or an- 
alogies in the Hebrew codes whatever. Law 146 reads : 
"If a man take a wife and she give a maid servant to 
her husband and that maid servant bear children and 
afterward would take rank with her mistress because 
she has borne children, her mistress may not sell her 
for money, but she may reduce her to bondage and 
count her among the maid servants." Now, this was 
precisely what happened in the case of Sarah and Hagar. 
Sarah, being childless, gave her maid, Hagar, to Abra- 
ham, we are told in the sixteenth chapter of Genesis, 
and wken Hagar saw that she had conceived, her mis- 



88 Bible and Spade 

tress was despised in her eyes. Sarah makes com- 
plaint to Abraham of the wrong done her and calls 
the Lord as judge between him and her, whereupon 
Abraham surrenders Hagar to her to do as she pleases. 
Hagar is again a bondwoman in the hand of her mis- 
tress. This does not mean that in this particular case 
Babyonian legislation directly affected Hebrew prac- 
tice, but of that later. 

The other Bible passage which receives elucidation 
from the Hammurapi code is the story of the Hebrew 
spies who lodged with Rahab at Jericho. In Joshua 
2 : 1, we read: "And they went and came into the har- 
lot's house and lodged there." There is in this ac- 
count, as ordinarily interpreted, something peculiarly 
shocking to us. That the spies on a sacred and war- 
like mission, having the burden of that great responsi- 
bility on their shoulders, should take the opportunity 
to go to the house of a harlot in Jericho seems to re- 
flect on the moral character of Hebrew leadership in 
that day. Turning to the code of Hammurapi, we find 
in the laws, 108-111, dealing with wine sellers or tavern 
keepers, that the gender of the wine seller or tavern- 
keeper is always feminine. The trade was in the hands 
of women. It is also evident from these laws that the 
places where wine was sold were lodging-houses for 
the traveller. The wine seller was the inn or tavern- 
keeper, and one of these words really best conveys the 
sense of the Babylonian wine seller. It is further evi- 
dent from the terms of this legislation that outlaws 
and bad characters were apt to collect in these taverns, 
that they were places of doubtful repute; so a priestess 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 89 

was forbidden to enter a tavern or to become the mis- 
tress of a tavern. This throws light on the character 
of the place to which the spies went in Jericho and on 
the position of Rahab. They went to the tavern be- 
cause it was the only place to which one could go, 
unless one became, through courtesy, the guest of a 
resident of the town. Rahab was the keeper of the 
tavern, and perhaps the better rendering of the passage 
in Joshua 2 : 1 would be: " And they went and came to 
an inn and lodged there"; and Rahab should be called 
Rahab the tavern-keeper, rather than Rahab the har- 
lot. It may be added that we have from Jewish 
sources corroborative evidence of the disreputable 
character of the hotel business in Palestine in later 
ages. Jewish ritual provisions forbade the marriage 
of a priest with a woman connected with the business 
of keeping a tavern. 

Later discoveries have shown us that this code of 
Hammurapi, early as it is, dating from before 2000 
B. C, had still earlier codes behind it. Hammurapi 
accomplished in this code precisely what King Alfred 
of England did in his famous "Dooms." Alfred found 
in England a variety of dooms or judgments sanctioned 
by the kings of various localities. These he gathered 
together "and commanded many of those to be written 
which our forefathers held, those which to me seemed 
good; and many of those which seemed to me not good 
I rejected them, by the Council of my Witan, and in 
otherwise commanded them to be holden; for I durst 
not venture to set down in writing much of my own, for 
it was unknown to me what of it would please those 



90 Bible and Spade 

who came after us. But those things which I met with, 
either of the days of Ine my kinsman, or of Offa king 
of the Mercians, or of iEthelbryght, who first among the 
English race received baptism, those which seemed to 
me the rightest, those I have gathered together, and 
rejected the others." 

It may be added that King Alfred began his dooms 
with a somewhat free revision of the ten command- 
ments of Moses, followed by an equally free revision of 
the early legislation contained in the following chapters 
of Exodus, 20-23. Hammurapi, precisely in the same 
way, gathered together in a code ancient laws of differ- 
ent dates and sources, adapted them to present condi- 
tions, with necessary modifications, and then organized 
the whole systematically into a code. This code was 
inscribed on stelse 1 which were set up in various places 
in the land. Now this code dates from a time when 
Babylonian armies overran Syria and Palestine and the 
kings and peoples of countries from the Persian moun- 
tains to the Mediterranean Sea rendered allegiance to 
a Babylonian suzerain. There was, at that time, a 
general conformity of civilization throughout that 
entire region, the myths and legends, magic and de- 
monology, the religious worship, the weights and mea- 
sures, the divisions of time and the like, were largely 
the same in Babylonia and in Palestine. Later the 
dynasty of Hammurapi fell before the people of the 
sea country and the Cassites, the Mitannians estab- 
lished themselves in Mesopotamia and the Hittites in 

1 Cf. the erection by the Hebrews of laws on pillars at Shechem, 
Deut. 27. 



Cosmogony and Folk-Lore 91 

central and western Asia Minor, and for a time com- 
munication between east and west was almost cut off. 
Then Egypt overran Syria and Palestine and included 
them in a mighty empire. Then began that period 
of universal disturbance with which I dealt in part in 
my first lecture, when the Hittites pressed down into 
Syria from Asia Minor, the Philistines, Sardinians, and 
other foreigners from the northern coasts and islands 
of the Mediterranean descended on the coast lands, 
and the Aramaeans from the northeast on the hinter- 
land, bringing chaos and confusion in the whole west 
land. Nevertheless, certain basic ideas and princi- 
ples of the earlier civilization remained unchanged. 
The language of ordinary use was still Semitic of the 
Amorite stock, the old Babylonian script continued in 
use, with the Babylonian practice of writing on clay 
tablets, and with these went the old religion, the old 
cult, and the general principles of the old jurisprudence. 
These were the conditions that the Hebrews found 
when they entered Palestine. They found the relics 
of the old Babylonian civilization. With the funda- 
mental principles of the laws which lay back of Ham- 
murapi's code, in part at least, they were naturally 
sympathetic. Those were the ancestral fundamental 
principles of the northern Semites, which the Aramaeans 
shared with the Amorites and Babylonians. 1 Those 
old principles of law had, however, to be developed to 
conform to their new life as inhabitants of cities and 
as agriculturists in Canaan. They must have taken 

1 Note that an Assyrian code of laws from about 1500 B. C. 
was discovered in Ashur by the German excavators. 



92 Bible and Spade 

over from the Canaanite inhabitants many cf their 
laws, precisely as they took over their sacred sites and 
religious practices, but the laws which had been de- 
veloped in Canaan, while having a general relation to 
the laws of Hammurapi's code, could never have been 
identical with those laws. The conditions of life in 
the two regions were very different, and even had they 
been the same, the Hebrews, with their own different 
customs and traditions, and especially with their 
different religious institutions, could never have taken 
over from the Canaanites precisely the laws which they 
had developed. There is a certain relationship be- 
tween the laws of Hammurapi and the laws of the 
Hebrew codes, especially of the earlier ones in Ex. 
20-23 (but to some extent also the codes of Deu- 
teronomy and Leviticus), but that connection is an 
indirect one. It is not a case of borrowing from the 
laws of Hammurapi, but a case of the possession and 
inheritance of a civilization and of ideas and constitu- 
tions similar in their fundamentals to the civilization 
and the cult of Babylonia. 



Ill 

HISTORY AND PROPHECY 

I closed my first lecture with some reference to the 
chaos, the Dark Ages which overwhelmed the ancient 
civilization in the thirteenth and following centuries, 
very much as in the Dark Ages of the post-Christian 
period the barbarian hordes overwhelmed Roman and 
Greek civilization and overthrew those empires. It 
is not until the close of the eleventh century that the 
veil really begins to lift. The Bible gives us, in the 
books of Joshua and Judges, the story of the struggle 
for the mastery and possession of Palestine between 
Hebrews, Canaanites, and Philistines, but we learn 
nothing of, or from, the outside world. Egyptian, 
Assyrian, and Babylonian inscriptions tell us from this 
period practically nothing of Canaan and of the Israel- 
ites. There is a curious little travel story, or it may be 
the report of an Egyptian official who visited Canaan 
and the Phoenician coast land, somewhere about the 
middle of the period of the Judges. According to this 
story Egypt, at that time, still made a shadowy claim 
to the sovereignty of the land. The city of Dor, on 
the coast just south of Mount Carmel, belonged to one 
of the peoples against whom we found Ramses III fight- 
ing, kindred to the Philistines. The Philistines are 
clearly at that time a much more civilized people than 

93 



94 Bible and Spade 

the Hebrews. Being better organized also, they pressed 
in from the coast land, gradually dominating the He- 
brews, who were, although superior in numbers, less 
well equipped and organized. The result of the 
struggle, however, was that the disunited Hebrews 
were welded together and, finding at last an heroic 
leader, a natural military genius and organizer, David, 
they became a real nation and established a great 
kingdom, levying tribute, as the Egyptians used to do, 
on all the peoples of Palestine and many of the kings 
and princes northward, as far as the Euphrates, being 
on terms of equal alliance only with the Phoenician 
cities of the coast land. 

When the veil lifts, about 1000 B. C, we find an 
enormous advance in civilization resulting from the 
great catastrophe. Iron has taken the place of copper. 
Evidently, those nations which had poured down from 
the north and overwhelmed the ancient civilizations of 
Italy, Greece, the iEgean, Asia Minor, Egypt, Canaan, 
Syria, Mesopotamia, Assyria, and Babylonia, had 
been able to do so particularly because of their better 
armament. It was like Cortez and his little band of 
Spaniards overwhelming the Mexicans with their guns 
and horses. The introduction of iron, not merely for 
purpose of ornament, as heretofore, but for practical 
use in tools and weapons, marks one of the great stages 
in the upward movement of civilization in the human 
race. But not only do we find the use of iron coming 
out of that chaos and welter of the nations, but also an 
alphabet. The el-Amarna letters were written in the 
cuneiform script, a most complicated and awkward 



History and Prophecy 95 

method of writing, from our point of view, although 
superior to anything then in existence — to the hiero- 
glyphic script of Egypt, to the script of the Hittites, 
to the script pf Crete — as is shown by the fact that it, 
and it only, was adopted by foreign peoples as a means 
of writing their own language. When we first find 
writing after the Dark Ages in the country on the 
eastern Mediterranean coast, our own alphabetical 
system, which has continued to this day, had taken the 
place of that cumbersome script of ideograms and 
determinatives. This was a still greater step forward 
in civilization than the use of iron. We find the marks 
of this change in writing in the Bible. It is at this 
period that we begin to have written records in the 
Hebrew. They had now a means of communication, 
vastly superior to anything heretofore existing, which 
tempted men to write, as the former system had hin- 
dered them from doing. Tradition says that it was 
with the Phoenicians that this script originated; cer- 
tainly the earliest records come from that eastern 
coast land of the Mediterranean, and it is nations 
immediately about that region which we find first 
using the fully developed alphabetic script. How it 
originated, from what one of the previous systems of 
writing it was derived, we do not know; perhaps from 
a combination of two or several, because it is from com- 
binations of different civilizations and different uses 
and ideas that new and better things are ordinarily 
developed. 

It is interesting to trace the parallels between the 
outcome of those Dark Ages of the pre-Christian world, 



96 Bible and Spade 

and the outcome of the Dark Ages of the post-Christian 
world. As from the former came iron and the alpha- 
bet, so from the latter came gunpowder and the print- 
ing-press; but there is another interesting parallel 
between the two. Out of the post-Christian Dark 
Ages came the dawn of a new spiritual and creative 
era. The thirteenth century is looked back to now by 
many as one of the wonderful centuries of the world's 
history, because of its development in architecture, as 
evinced in the cathedrals, and because of that adapta- 
tion of the old heathen philosophy to the Christian 
Scriptures which produced scholastic theology, and 
was one of the elements that prepared the way for the 
later advance in religion. So, also, out of the Dark Ages 
of those pre-Christian centuries came the religion of 
Israel, basing upon the ancient prophet Moses, just 
as the scholastic learning based upon Jesus; and as that 
thirteenth century built cathedrals, which embodied 
and crystallized, as it were, the Christian religion, so 
Israel built the great temple at Jerusalem which was 
destined to play so mighty a part in the upbuilding of 
the religion of Israel. 

But before we turn to the light which archaeology 
throws on that temple, let me say a word about David's 
kingdom. The Old Testament describes him as a 
mighty conqueror who established a great empire. 
Among the peoples tributary to him were the old kin- 
dred Hebrew nations of Ammon, Moab, and Edom to 
the east of the Jordan, Amalek and the other half- 
nomadic peoples southward to the borders of Egypt, 
the Philistine cities of the coast land, and, northward, 



History and Prophecy 97 

Aramaean, Amorite, and Hittite states as far as to 
Aleppo; so that his kingdom is described as extending 
from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates. This was the 
greatest extent of Hebrew rule, so vastly beyond any- 
thing that came after that it became an ideal which fu- 
ture generations regarded almost as an impossibility, 
only reached and to be reached by special divine inter- 
position. David and his kingdom became the founda- 
tion of what we now call the Messianic hope. Of 
course, stories grew about what David had been, as they 
always will about any great hero, by exaggeration and 
idealization. The result has been that modern his- 
torians of the Hebrews, with their tendency to distrust 
what has come down to us and to make overanxious 
allowance for possible incorrect statements and exag- 
gerations, have tended to deny the truth of the great- 
ness of David's kingdom. How could this little state 
of Judah become so mighty? Were there not other 
great kingdoms in Assyria, in Babylonia, in Egypt, in 
Syria, or Asia Minor, which would inevitably have 
prevented such a thing? Now, it is here that the 
Assyrian and Egyptian records, and the Hittite also, 
for that matter, come to our help, and show us that 
the coast was clear for any relatively petty state, 
under good generaliship, to carve out for itself at that 
moment an empire. Everything that existed had been 
destroyed by the great catastrophe of which we have 
been speaking. Assyria and Babylonia had been, for 
the time, overwhelmed. They continued to maintain 
their existence, and ultimately came out of the catas- 
trophe in better shape than Egypt, but such inscrip- 



98 Bible and Spade 

tions as we have from this period show us that they 
were so busy struggling to hold their own against 
invading hordes from the north that they could not 
possibly intervene in regions so far away as Syria and 
Palestine. And indeed that remained true still for a 
couple of centuries. Assyrian records do indeed boast 
of great victories, of defeating Aramaean hordes in the 
north, but one observes that the Assyrians are contin- 
ually giving ground, not gaining ground, so that at one 
period they were even forced to remove their capital 
back down the Tigris to the ancient site of Ashur. 
The Hittite empire also had gone to pieces. Smaller 
Hittite kingdoms had sprung up here and there, but 
none of any importance. There was no Amorite king- 
dom of any strength in the west. The Aramaeans who 
were settling themselves in Syria had not established 
any great state. Damascus was later to come to the 
front as more than the rival of Israel, but that time 
had not yet arrived. In the south, Egypt was unable 
to maintain its own. The Nubians or Ethiopians were 
conquering it, creating, however, for the present, no 
stable kingdom. While we have found nowhere any 
records which mention David or which mention at 
this period the kingdom of the Hebrews, and, in fact, 
we have found no inscriptions which would have any 
occasion to do so, the few records that have come down 
confirm the Bible story, in so far as they show that con- 
ditions were entirely favorable for the accomplish- 
ment of that which we are told in the Bible story was 
accomplished by David. 1 

1 We are indeed told that the Pharaoh gave Gezer to Solomon 
as the marriage portion of his daughter, and in Rehoboam'e 



History and Prophecy 99 

Inscriptions have, however, given us some interesting 
information about the Hebrew religion at this period. 
The name of the God of Judah in latter days was Ya- 
haweh, but in the personal names and the old ritual 
formulae in the Bible, the divine name is not Yahaweh, 
but Yahu (with nominative ending) or Yah, as in Hal- 
leluiah (i. e. Hallelu-Yah, praise Yah), that old ritual 
cry of the Hebrews, or in such names as Isaiah, 
Hezekiah, and the like. 

One of the results of the decipherment of the old 
records which have been dug up in Babylonia is to 
make us conscious of the great importance of personal 
names in the study of the history and especially the 
religion of any people. The names of the gods they 
worship and to a certain extent their institutions are 
reflected in the names of kings, priests, and leaders, and 
by the prevalence of certain names we are able to de- 
termine the relationship of peoples and their religions, 
and to gain some insight into their chronology. Years 
ago my attention was called to the use of the divine 
name in Israelite personal names, with a view to de- 
termining its origin. I was struck with the fact that 
the divine name Yah commences to become prominent 
in David's time. After he set up the Ark in Jerusalem, 
the divine name Yah becomes the dominating name in 
Judah, and especially in the royal family. On the 
other hand, it does not come to the fore among the 
ten tribes until two hundred years later, in the time of 
the great prophet Elijah, whose name means "Yah 

time the Pharaoh raided and plundered Palestine. This was the 
reflection of past relations, and a passing attempt of new dynasts 
to enforce or restore old claims and old conditions. 



100 Bible and Spade 

(or Yahu) is my God." I was also led to suspect, from 
what I found, that the original form of the divine name 
was Yahu or Yah. This has been confirmed most 
curiously in later times. Some years since there were 
discovered in Jeb, or Elephantine, in Egypt, records, 
dating from about 400 B. C, of a Jewish military col- 
ony which was established there perhaps in the sixth or 
seventh century before Christ, which had its own temple 
and which worshipped Yahu. They show us, that is, 
that the name by which these Jews knew their God was 
Yahu, not Yahaweh. There have been discovered 
also various inscriptions in the north of Syria from the 
kings of certain small states, showing this same form 
Yahu in composition in the names of kings of Ara- 
maean cities, suggesting that Yahu was a God name 
known to various Aramaean tribes. It is curious and 
perhaps significant that in the historical development 
the name Yahu shows itself first in the tribe of Judah, 
as already noted, and that we have among these same 
Aramaean peoples in northern Syria using the divine 
name Yahu two whose name is practically identical 
with Judah, namely Jaudi. Indeed, when this name 
was first found in the Assyrian inscriptions, scholars 
supposed that it was our Judah. The suggestion is 
that in some way or another the name Judah (Jehudah) 
and the old name Yahu (Jehu) of the Divinity were 
connected; that Yahu, or, without the nominal ending, 
Yah, was the original name of this Divinity common to 
the Hebrews with other Aramaean clans; and that the 
Hebrews ultimately differentiated this divine name, 
making it unique and peculiar to themselves by add- 



History and Prophecy 101 

ing to it at the end, as a consequence of which the 
sacred name which has come down to us in the Hebrew 
Scriptures in separate use is different from that which 
meets us in personal names and in the inscriptions. 

It was not David, but his son, Solomon, as the book 
of Kings tells us, who erected the temple at Jerusalem. 
The name used for this temple in the Hebrew is exactly 
the same word used in the Assyrian and Babylonian 
records, but that word, E-gal, 1 great house, is not a 
Semitic word; that is, it does not belong to the lan- 
guage stock of the Hebrews or Phoenicians, or of any 
of their kindred peoples. It was with the decipher- 
ment of the cuneiform inscriptions of Assyria and 
Babylonia that we first learned its origin and its 
meaning. It is a Sumerian word, or rather two words, 
meaning great house. That this word compound was 
taken over into all the north Semitic languages as the 
name for a certain sort of temple shows the relation 
of that ancient civilization of southern Babylonia to 
the civilization, the cult, and especially the religious 
practices, of all hither Asia. I have already noted that 
the Sumerian language continued among the Semitic 
Babylonians and among the Assyrians, down almost 

1 E-gal means both temple and palace, suggesting the original 
connection of the two, which is confirmed by the account of the 
construction of temple and palace and of the relation of king 
and temple as described in our book of Kings. The temple at 
Jerusalem was in fact, until the Exile, the royal church or cathe- 
dral of the kings of Judah, and not to the exclusion of other 
places of worship. The beginning of the attempt to make it 
exclusive is found in the reformation under Josiah, and the adap- 
tation and adoption of the law book of the old Israelite shrine 
at Shechem, Deuteronomy. 



102 Bible and Spade 

to the time of Christ, to be the church language, the 
language in which hymns and incantations and ex- 
orcisms were written, that it played for hither Asia 
the part which Latin played in the western world down 
to and, in many places, after the Reformation. Our 
excavations of Babylonian temples have shown us, 
furthermore, that, in principle, the temple at Jerusa- 
lem was copied after those old Semitic temples of 
Babylonia, which originated with the Sumerians, and 
which were developed among the Semites, who took 
over the script and so much of the cult and religion 
of the old Sumerians, combining with these contribu- 
tions of their own. Let me take, for instance, the 
greatest of all the temples of the old time, the tem- 
ple of Enlil, the great god of Nippur, which I had the 
good fortune to excavate. This temple was called 
E-Kur, Mountain House. A huge platform was raised 
high above the plain, and on one side of this platform 
was erected an artificial mountain, a three-stepped 
stage pyramid. In front and on two sides of this were 
great courts, about which were buildings. The altar 
was in the inner court at the foot of the ziggurat or 
stage pyramid. The top of this ziggurat was too much 
ruined for us to determine absolutely what was there, 
but according to Herodotus' s account of a similar later 
temple of Marduk in Babylonia, on top was a chamber 
having no image, but which was occupied each night by 
the priestess who waited there to serve the god should 
he descend. 1 

1 There has come down to us a stele of a Babylonian king, 
Nabu-ablu-iddina, containing a representation of sacrifice to 



History and Prophecy 103 

The Hebrew temple was built on top of a hill, which 
was so terraced by a great retaining wall as to con- 
stitute a large, level platform. At one side of this, 
raised above the platform, stood the temple building, 
the sacred place, in front of which was the altar. 
Going into the building, one would find that there 
were two chambers, a larger one in front, and behind 
that a smaller chamber, the inner sanctuary, without 
window of any sort. This inner chamber was the 
earthly abiding place of the God of the Jews. No im- 
age of him was erected here, but there was a wooden 
box containing two stone tablets with five words on 
each, and by these two great human-headed, winged 
creatures, the cherubim. From the description of 
these cherubim which we find in the first chapter of 
the book of Ezekiel it would appear that they were, 
in principle certainly, the same as the great figures 
which have been discovered in Assyrian temples, winged 
lions and winged bulls, which represented the presence 
of the divinity. The book of Genesis tells us that 
cherubim were placed outside the Garden of Eden as 
guardians to guard the dwelling-place of God, that 
man, driven forth, might not return. In Assyria the 
cherubim stood outside the temple doors, like the cheru- 
bim of the story of Eden, but in the Jerusalem temple 

Shamash, the Sun-god. Below are the altar and sacrifice, with 
the priest and worshippers before it. Above is a tabernacle, 
inside of which is the figure of the Sun-god. Outside of this two 
figures, angels or ministers, let down to the altar by cords the 
sun disk. The god is a person, unseen, dwelling in an inner holy 
of holies, acting through the visible disk of the sun, whose mo- 
tions are controlled by his ministers; through which also, as fire, 
he accepts and consumes the offerings burned on his altars. 



104 Bible and Spade 

they were placed within, in the shrine itself. That 
they were the bearers or supporters of the Presence of 
God, is indicated by the account in the first chapter of 
Ezekiel. And here, unless I am mistaken, we come 
to one of those striking differences between the Hebrew 
and the Babylonian or Egyptian or whatsoever heathen 
people. While the Jew retained the cherubim, he 
removed it from the place in which it was conspicuous, 
and where it might have become an object of worship. 
He did not abolish it until after the Exile, but he hid 
it in the inner shrine. When Jeroboam led the revolt 
of the ten tribes against the oriental despotism of Solo- 
mon, recalling Israel to more primitive conditions, he 
restored in those temples which he made royal chapels — 
Bethel and Dan — the bull * to its former place in the 
open. 

The temple at Jerusalem was a striking contrast to 
the more primitive, previously existing conditions of 
worship among the Israelites. The Babylonian idea 
of a temple had long before this made itself felt in the 
west, and from what we can gather from the few repre- 
sentations which have come down to us, the Phoeni- 
cians had temples similar in form to that which Solo- 
mon erected in Jerusalem. The ordinary form of wor- 
ship throughout Canaan, however, was of a different 
type, a ruder idea of worship, connecting itself with 
fountains, sacred stones, trees, and the like, but of that 
more hereafter, when we discuss the excavations in 
Palestine. It was the close touch of Solomon with the 
Phoenicians, probably, which led him to build the 

1 Was it a winged bull? 



History and Prophecy 105 

elaborate temple in Jerusalem, which was in its form 
and idea indirectly derived from the old Sumerian 
Babylonian temples. 1 

And one thing more. We find in David's time, ac- 
cording to the book of Samuel, Cretans and other 
foreigners serving in the temple, and from time to 
time in the later records we find mention of Nethinim, 
or persons given; that is, those enslaved and compelled 
to serve in the temple. We have, in fact; in the book 
of Joshua, a reference to the enslaving of the Gibeon- 
ites, who were made "hewers of wood and drawers of 
w r ater' for the temple. Ultimately, long after the 
Exile, these Nethinim were finally included among the 
Levites. We have found at Nippur some of the temple 
pay lists, containing the titles of a great many of the 
officials serving in the temple, the amounts which they 

1 There was a resemblance also in many details, as in the palm 
decorations, in the great basin, which represented the Tehom, or 
abyss of waters beneath the earth. Peculiarly Hebrew in the 
Jerusalem temple, however, was the Ark, with its contents of 
the Decalogue. With this we may compare the pillars of the 
Law set up at that more ancient Israelite shrine at Shechem 
(Deut. 27). In both cases, it will be observed, a representation 
of the Law of God takes the place of the figure of a god. It 
should be added that besides the great temples of Babylonia 
with ziggurats, described above, there were others, and these 
by far the more common, which consisted of two rooms, with 
their doors so arranged that a worshipper standing in the court 
without could see the centre of the back wall of the inner chamber. 
Here, in the place occupied in the Hebrew Holy of Holies by the 
Ark, stood an image or other representation of the god. Be- 
hind this wall was commonly a treasury (the Hebrew debir), 
where records or precious things were safe under the protection 
of the divinity. The altar was in the court in front of the outer 
room. Such shrines we found at Nippur in connection with 
the great temple, and such shrines the Germans found at Babylon. 



106 Bible and Spade 

received In payment, and the like. Against the names 
of some in these lists it is marked that they had ab- 
sconded. They were clearly slaves who had taken an 
opportunity to escape. These lists are a curious com- 
mentary on the history of the development of the temple 
staff at Jerusalem. The same methods were pursued 
in the one place as in the other. Little by little a more 
spiritual conception entered into the Hebrew practice, 
until ultimately all service was rendered by those 
who were consecrated and attached to the temple by a 
bond of religion, not of servitude, and all who served 
in the temple in any capacity were counted to the 
tribe of Levi. 

Assyrian records throw light on the stories of Ahab, 
Jehu, and Jeroboam II in a way to which I think suffi- 
cient attention is not ordinarily called. It was some- 
where in the ninth century before Christ that the 
Assyrian power began to revive, after the period of 
struggle and catastrophe of which I have already 
spoken, sufficiently to send its armies into the west land, 
northern Syria. It was Ashur-nasir-pal II, 884-860 
B. C, who carried the conquests of Assyria as far as to 
the Mediterranean. It was his successor, Shalmaneser 
III, with whom Israel first came in contact. In 854 
this Shalmaneser was met by a confederation of kings 
of the west land, among whom were Ahab of Israel 
and Ben-Hadad of Damascus. The latter is evidently 
the most powerful of the confederates, but Israel is no 
mean second. The Assyrian records of this time, com- 
bined with those of the Bible, explain to us Ahab's 
policy. Damascus was the most powerful state of 



History and Prophecy 107 

the west, which was trying to gain the hegemony. 
Ahab's alliance by marriage with the daughter of the 
priest-king of Tyre was for the purpose of getting as- 
sistance against Damascus. Only when Assyria ap- 
peared on the scene did Ahab join forces with the other 
kings of the west land under Ben-Hadad's lead to resist 
the still greater danger. Now, all such alliances in- 
volved the introduction of the worship of other gods. 
So we are told with regard to Solomon that he set up 
the worship of all sorts of foreign divinities about his 
temple at Jerusalem, because he married the daugh- 
ters of foreign kings. He made alliances with them 
and brought in their worship. Alliances, and most 
of all a close alliance cemented by marriage, involved 
such introduction of foreign worship. Now, what was 
poor Ahab to do — be crushed by Damascus, or make 
an alliance with the king of Tyre and introduce Baal 
worship? Here was the attitude which the prophets 
of Israel took throughout, or at least those whose 
record has come down to us as true prophets: "No 
foreign worship under any circumstances. Let us 
stand by ourselves. Keep out of these alliances and 
trust to the Lord for help." It was very idealistic, 
and it seemed to most of those old kings very unpracti- 
cal. I wonder how we should have felt about it? 

The battle of Qarqar, where these kings of the west 
land fought with Shalmaneser in 854, gives us a fixed 
date for Israelite and Judean history, changing con- 
siderably the dates reached by dead reckoning of the 
regnal years of successive kings in the Judean and 
Israelite accounts given in the Bible, which constitute 



/ 



108 Bible and Spade 

a part of that chronology of Archbishop Usher, which, 
in the boyhood of the elder among us, was regarded as 
a constituent part of the Bible. 

The next record in the Assyrian inscriptions shows us 
a changed situation, and explains to us the meaning of 
the Hebrew historical records of that period, which were 
not thoroughly understandable before. In 842 the 
king of Assyria was again in the west country. This 
time Jehu 1 is on the throne of Israel. Instead of being 
in alliance with Damascus, he pays tribute to the As- 
syrian king. Now Jehu was the follower of the proph- 
ets Elijah and Elisha in the most fanatical way, so 
fanatical that the later prophets, like Hosea, denounce 
him. He undertook to blot out foreign worship in 
Israel altogether by a combination of cruelty with 
treachery. Under pretense of a great feast he got 
together all the Baal priests and massacred them. 
He would have no such alliance as Ahab's house had 
made. Without Tyre to help him the hand of Damas- 
cus fell heavy upon him, and the Bible records tell 
us how the Syrians prevailed against Israel. Jehu 
paid tribute to Assyria to buy the Assyrian king to 
attack Damascus. 

The Assyrian records throw a good deal of light on 
the political situation from this time forward until the 

1 Jehu or Yehu or Yahu. What is here written J is the letter 
elsewhere written / or F. Vowels are unessential and, if short, 
interchangeable. What is here written e is there written a. 
Jehu is Yahu, the Hebrew sacred divine name. That was clearly 
not his whole name, but only part of it. That he should be thus 
called is evidence of the effect on men's imagination of his Yahu 
or Yahaweh fanaticism. 



History and Prophecy 109 

time of Jeroboam. The Assyrian campaigns in the 
west weaken both Assyria and Damascus, and ulti- 
mately Israel has the opportunity to recuperate and at 
last, under Jeroboam II, about 750 B. C, becomes the 
most important kingdom of the west, more important 
than Damascus. But Assyria shortly regains its 
strength and under a great conqueror, Tiglath-Pileser 
IV, recommences the conquest of the west. Partly 
from the Bible, partly from the Assyrian inscriptions, 
by putting the two together, one can now read the 
whole record, and understand the whole policies of the 
period down to the destruction of Damascus in 734, 
and the final capture of Samaria in 721, when Sargon 
transported nearly 30,000 of the principal men of 
Samaria, settling some of them on the river Khabor in 
Mesopotamia, where a few years ago were discovered 
inscriptions, the names on which seem to give evidence 
that at that period, somewhere in the following cen- 
tury, Israelites of the ten tribes were dwelling as As- 
syrian subjects in that territory. 

Every one is familiar with the discovery of the in- 
scriptions of Sennacherib recording the invasion of 
Palestine in 701 B. C. This record has been so often 
commented on in connection with the Bible story, 
and is so familiar, that I will do no more than to call 
attention to one extremely important matter which is 
brought out by these records, which has not received 
the emphasis it ought to have received. Apparently 
the Assyrian records of Sennacherib's predecessor, 
Sargon, show the Assyrians moving back and forth, 
up and down the Philistine coast, and once invading 



110 Bible and Spade 

Palestine itself. References to these movements are 
contained in the book of Isaiah, chapters 10, 20. In 
the historical addition to the book of Isaiah, chapters 
36-39, we are told how after Sargon's death and 
the accession of Sennacherib Merodach-Baladan, that 
turbulent Chaldaean who had made himself king of 
Babylon, sent messengers to Hezekiah, and Hezekiah 
showed those messengers his treasures. Evidently this 
was part of the arrangement for the great rebellion 
against Sennacherib, which took place almost immedi- 
ately after he came to the throne. Merodach-Baladan 
was the heart and soul of this, and Hezekiah was the 
leader, as we learn from the Assyrian inscriptions as 
well as the Bible record, in the west land. Isaiah pro- 
tests with all his might against this alliance. His 
attitude is the same as that of the former prophets. 
His loyalty to Yahaweh, the God of Israel, leads him 
to oppose any such alliance, which must mean intro- 
duction of the worship of false gods, as earlier in his 
career he had found the league of Ahaz with Assyria 
to mean the introduction of Assyrian worship. We 
know now from the Assyrian inscriptions why it was 
that Merodach-Baladan was able to make himself 
master of Babylon and to enlist the Babylonians with 
their great wealth in the revolt against Assyria. Baby- 
lon was the Rome of that period. Whoever became 
king of Assyria must come and take the hands of Mar- 
duk in Babylon. This all other Assyrian kings had 
done, but Sennacherib failed to do so, and regarded 
and treated Babylon as an ordinary province of his 
kingdom. Both the political and the religious pride of 



History and Prophecy 111 

the Babylonians was deeply offended by this and in 
the Babylonian records Sennacherib is not recognized 
as king. Thus, its pride and its prestige damaged, 
Babylon was ready to welcome any one who would en- 
able it to assert again its religious supremacy. Sen- 
nacherib first directed his armies against Babylon, 
and it was not until four years after his accession that, 
victorious there, he marched against Palestine. He 
has given in his inscriptions a vivid account of the way 
he laid waste that country, carrying off over 200,000 
captives, besides innumerable cattle; how Hezekiah, 
who was the head of the revolt in that region, had 
dethroned the king of Ekron, loyal to the Assyrians, 
holding him prisoner in Jerusalem and setting up in 
his stead a tool of his own; how Sennacherib shut up 
Hezekiah in Jerusalem; how Hezekiah made submis- 
sion and paid a large tribute, besides surrendering the 
women of his harem and his daughters. We have a 
bas-relief of Sennacherib besieging and capturing the 
most southern of the fortresses of Judah, on the edge 
of the Philistine plain, the ancient Lachish. Then we 
learn how the king of Egypt, who had been coquetting 
with the allies, moved against Sennacherib, and how 
the latter, fearing treachery from the rear, sent a 
force to Jerusalem to demand the absolute surrender 
of that city, and of Hezekiah himself, that he might 
not have a hostile fortress behind him. 

It is a very dramatic story as told in the book of 
Kings and in the prose addition to the book of Isaiah: 
the Rabshakeh's insolent demand of immediate sur- 
render, his insulting attitude toward Hezekiah; Heze- 



112 Bible and Spade 

** 

kiah's supplication before the Lord in the temple as he 
spreads out Sennacherib's letter before him, and then 
the appearance of Isaiah, who had so strongly de- 
nounced Ahaz's alliance with the Assyrians and Heze- 
kiah's alliance with Merodach-Baladan and the Egyp- 
tians. Now Isaiah bids Hezekiah without fear to re- 
ject Sennacherib's terms and to defend the city against 
the mighty Assyrians, trusting in the power of the 
Lord God of Israel. Sennacherib's army w^as de- 
stroyed, apparently by the plague, and Sennacherib 
obliged to abandon Palestine, leaving Jerusalem un- 
taken. This practical defeat of the mighty Assyrian 
by the Lord God of Israel made the most profound 
impression, both in the religious and political life of 
Judah. As we shall see in another lecture, the peculiar 
position of Jerusalem and the temple of Jerusalem 
made that city, or rather perhaps the temple of God 
in that city, an almost impregnable fortress. The exhi- 
bition in this particular crisis of that impregnability 
helped enormously to develop the idea that the Lord 
God of Zion was invincible, a belief which played a 
great part in the development of the Messianic hope. 
But the disaster which befell Sennacherib's army, 
and his consequent retreat, had another effect, this 
time in Babylonia. Sennacherib, after driving out 
Merodach-Baladan from Babylonia in 702, had set up 
in his place a puppet king, Bel-ibni. Encouraged by 
Sennacherib's defeat in the west, Babylon now rose 
against Bel-ibni and welcomed back Merodach-Bala- 
dan, in 700 B. C. Again Sennacherib drove out 
Merodach-Baladan, setting up in his stead this time as 



History and Prophecy 113 

king of Babylon his own son, Ashur-Nadin-Shum, who 
succeeded in maintaining himself for five years. At 
the end of that time Merodach-Baladan's Chaldeans, 
who had taken refuge in Elam, invaded Babylonia in 
conjunction with the Elamites, captured Babylon, 
took prisoner Sennacherib's son and set up another 
king in his place. Sennacherib's first attempt to re- 
gain the country ended in a defeat. It was not until 
689 that he finally succeeded in reconquering Babylon. 
Angered and outraged by the persistent rebellions of 
that city, he determined to destroy it for good and all. 
Rogers, in his History of Assyria, vol. II, gives this ac- 
count of what he did, which fairly estimates the char- 
acter of his act: 

Thereupon ensued one of the wildest scenes of human folly 
in all history. The city was treated exactly as the Assyrian 
kings had been accustomed to treat insignificant villages which 
had joined in rebellion. It was plundered, its inhabitants driven 
from their homes or deported, its walls broken down. The 
torch was then applied, and over the plain rolled the smoke con- 
suming temples and palaces, the fruit of centuries of high civili- 
zation. All that the art of man had up to that time devised of 
beauty and of glory, of majesty and massiveness, lay in one great 
smoldering ruin. Over this the waves of the Euphrates were 
diverted, that the site of antiquity's greatest city might be turned 
into a pestilential swamp. Marduk, the great god of the city, 
was carried away and set up in the city of Ashur, that no future 
settlers might be able to secure the protection of the deity who 
had raised the city to eminence. 

It was undoubtedly the hope and belief of Sennacherib that 
he had finally settled the Babylonian question, which had so 
long burdened him and former kings of Assyria. There would 
now, in his opinion, be no further trouble about the crowning of 



114 Bible and Spade 

kings in Babylon and the taking of the hands of Marduk, for 
the city was a swamp and Marduk an exile. There would be no 
more glorification of that city at the expense of Nineveh, which 
was now, by a process of elimination, assuredly the chief city of 
western Asia. But in all this Sennacherib reasoned not as a wise 
man. He had indeed blotted out the city, but the site hallowed 
by custom and venerated for centuries remained. He had slain 
or driven into exile the citizens, but in the hearts of the survivors 
there burned still the old patriotism, the old pride of citizenship 
in a world city. He had humbled the Babylonians indeed, but 
what of the Chaldeans who had already produced a Merodach- 
Baladan and might produce another like him, who would seek 
revenge for the punishment of his race and its allies in Baby- 
lonia? From a purely commercial point of view the destruction 
had been great folly. The plundering of the great city before its 
burning had undoubtedly produced immense treasure to carry 
away into Assyria, but there would have been a great annual 
income of tribute, which was now cut off; and a vast loss by the 
fire, which blotted out warehouses and extensive stores, as well 
as temples and palaces. This historic crime would later be 
avenged in full measure. In any estimation of the character of 
the Assyrian people the destruction of Babylon must be set 
down by the side of the raids and the murders of Ashur-nazir-pal. 
It is a sad episode in human history which gave over to savages 
in thought and in action the leadership of the Semitic race, and 
took it away from the Hebrews and Aramaeans and the culture- 
loving Babylonians. 

To appreciate what this act meant in the ancient 
world is very difficult for us moderns. The nearest 
parallel that I can suggest to the Babylon of that 
period is Rome of the Middle Ages. Babylon was the 
centre of the religion and the cult of all western Asia. 
For 1500 years it had been the leader of the religion, the 
thought, the civilization of the world. Its god, through 



History and Prophecy 115 

the priests of the great temple of E-sagila, gave empire 
to whom they would, precisely as did the Pope of Rome 
in the Middle Ages. Now his temple was destroyed 
and the statue of the great god himself carried off to 
Assyria, where he was made an underling in the As- 
syrian Olympus. Even in Assyria and in Sennacherib's 
own household his Rightfulness produced a revulsion. 
It was too horrible, too awful, too unutterably impious 
an outrage. Sennacherib himself was assassinated, 
and, to quote again from Rogers's history: 

Esarhaddon [Sennacherib's son and successor] was smitten 
with a great love for the ancient land with all its honored cus- 
toms. His whole life shows plainly how deeply he was influenced 
by the glory of Babylon's past, and how eager he was to see un- 
done the ruin which his father had wrought. As soon as the news 
of his father's death reached his ears he caused himself to be pro- 
claimed as shakkanak of Babylon. In this he was going back to 
the goodly example of his grandfather Sargon. Sennacherib 
had ceased altogether to wear a Babylonian title. Babylonia 
was to him, not a separated land united with his own, but a 
subject territory inhabited by slaves whom he despised. Esar- 
haddon did not even take the name of king, which in Babylonian 
eyes would have been unlawful without taking the hands of Mar- 
duk, now exiled to Assyria. 

In the very first year of his reign (680) Esarhaddon gave 
clear indication of his reversal of his father's policy. Babylon 
had been destroyed; he would rebuild it. No Assyrian king be- 
fore him had ever set himself so great a task. He did not live 
to see it brought to the final and glorious consummation which 
he had planned, but he did see and rejoice in a large part of the 
work. With much religious solemnity, with the anointing of 
oil and the pouring out of wine, was the foundation laying begun. 
From the swamps which Sennacherib had wantonly made slowly 
began to rise the renewed temple of E-sagila, the temple of the 



116 Bible and Spade 

great gods, while around it and the newly growing city the 
king erected from the foundations upward the great walls of 
Imgur-Bel and Nimitti-BeL All these, as the king boasts, were 
enlarged and beautified beyond that which they had been in their 
former glory. Slowly through his reign, along with the wars 
which must now be told, went on these works of peace and utility, 
to find their entire completion in the reign of Esarhaddon's 
like-minded son. 



This awful catastrophe could not fail to make its 
impression on the thought of Israel, an impression that 
strangely enough has been generally overlooked. It 
is the destruction of Babylon which is described in the 
two chapters of Isaiah, 13 and 14, which open the vol- 
ume of his prophecies on the nations. Those two chap- 
ters are now headed: "Oracle of Babylon, which Isaiah, 
son of Amos saw." They are in point of fact an oracle 
of the Day of Yahaweh, of which the destruction of 
Babylon was the culminating event, the real outcome 
of the Day of Yahaweh being the deliverance of the 
captives of Israel and the punishment of the Assyrian 
great power. It is, in other words, what we commonly 
define as a Messianic prophecy. Isaiah, as is evident 
from other passages in his writings, deeply impressed 
by the deportation of Israel and the capture of Samaria, 
which took place in his early ministry, in 721 B. C, 
looked to a restoration of those deported Israelites, 
and in his picture of the Day of Yahaweh he sees 
Jacob and Israel brought back from their captivity in 
Assyria and Media to their own country. The inso- 
lent destruction and devastation of the world in Sen- 
nacherib's wars, culminating in the ruin and desecra- 



History and Prophecy 117 

tion of Babylonia, with the removal of Marduk him- 
self to Nineveh, was the judgment of Yahaweh upon 
the world by the hand of the Assyrian, which of course 
was bound to result in good to the chosen people, bring- 
ing back from the lands of the Khabur and Media the 
deported captives of Jacob, and ending finally in the 
destruction of the hated Assyrians themselves in the 
holy mountain by a catastrophe vastly greater than 
that which befell them there in 701 B. C, and which 
itself so profoundly impressed the imagination of the 
prophet. 1 

There is another passage in the book of Isaiah, and 
it is also in the second volume of that book, the volume 
of the prophecies against the nations, chapters 13-27, 
which is curiously illustrated by Babylonian documents. 
This occurs in Isaiah's denunciation of Ephraim, fol- 



1 Our present book of Isaiah consists of two main sections, 
chapters 1-39 and 40-66. The latter is an anonymous work of 
the post-exilic period, of the very highest religious value, which 
has been bound up with the book of Isaiah. The book of Isaiah 
really consists of chapters 1-39, the last four chapters, however, 
being merely an historical supplement copied from the records, 
almost entirely from our book of Kings. The prophecies of 
Isaiah are contained in the first thirty-five chapters of our present 
book. To these was added for convenience of reference a his- 
torical supplement, copied from the records, and with the vol- 
ume so formed was bound up, in the case of the copy preserved 
in our Bible, another great book of prophecies, now commonly 
called Deutero-Isaiah. The book of Isaiah's prophecies, chap- 
ters 1-35, is in three parts, or volumes, carefully edited, each 
piously concluded by the editors with a hymn or a psalm section. 
Volume I, chapters 1-11, contains notices about Isaiah, together 
with prophecies from him, from 734 to 701, closing with a hymn, 
chapter 12. Volume III consists of five woes, very fully elabo- 
rated, four of them dealing with or basing on the struggle with 
the Assyrians under Sennacherib in 701 (chaps. 28-34), and also 



118 Bible arid Spade 

lowing and connected with a prophecy against Damas- 
cus (chap. 17), from the period of the alliance between 
those two countries at the very beginning of Isaiah's 
ministry, 734 or thereabouts. Apparently Ephraim 
had borrowed the Adonis or Tammuz cult from Da- 
mascus. It is the practice of this cult to which Isaiah 
refers (vv. 10, 11): 



tt 



For thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation, 

And the Rock of thy refuge thou has not remembered; 

Therefore thou plantest Adonis gardens, 

And the cutting of an alien God thou sowest; 

In the day of thy planting thou f orcest it, 

And on the morrow thou makest grow thy seed. 

Withered the harvest 

In the day of sickness and cureless pain." 

Adonis or Lord was the name given throughout 
Syria to the old Sumerian Babylonian god Tammuz. 

ends with a hymn (chap. 35). The second volume contains the 
" Burdens of the Nations," chapters 13-23, ending with an apoca- 
lypse, 24-27, interspersed with psalms, based on the overthrow of 
the Persian empire by Alexander the Great. While Isaiah proph- 
esied from 739 to 689 B. C., or a little beyond, his prophecies 
did not receive their final shape, therefore, until after more than 
350 years, and many of them were much edited and expanded in 
the intervening period. Our prophecy, the first in the "Burdens 
of the Nations," chapters 13, 14, shows something of this process. 
Isaiah's original prophecy on the fall of Babylon in 689 B. C. is 
contained in chapter 13, and 14 : 1, 2, 22-27. In this was inserted 
a Taunt Song on the fall of Nineveh (606 B. C), 14 : 4b-21, with 
an introduction, verses 3, 4a, applying it and, with it, the whole 
prophecy to the period after the Exile; thus making the original 
prophecy on the day of Yahaweh, based on the destruction of 
Babylon by Sennacherib in 689 B. C, an oracle on the capture 
of Babylon by Cyrus or Darius. This is a good illustration of 
the general method of the treatment of the prophecies in general, 
a living growth from their original delivery to their final canoniza- 
tion. 



History and Prophecy 119 

Tammuz was "the true son of the great deep." Origi- 
nally, he was the son of Ea, the god of Eridu, and was 
at the root of the great earth stalk which grew in that 
city, the central place of the earth. He was the grain 
buried beneath the ground at the time of the annual 
inundation of the Tigris and Euphrates, for the basis 
of the old Sumerian cults was the fertilization of the 
ground through the flooding of those rivers, which 
were the mother goddess. We have almost innumer- 
able fragments of liturgies from the very popular ritual 
of Tammuz, laments beginning: 

"Alas 1 my hero Damu ! 
Alas, child, true lord !" 

His mother, the goddess, is represented as beginning 
the wailing: 



'His mother wails, she begins the wailing for him. 
Wailing and sighing, she begins the wailing for him. 3 



Very commonly we have in such laments an expres- 
sion like this: "He is gone, he is gathered to the bosom 
of the earth." But the lamentation for his death is a 
prelude to the prayer for his return, and that prepares 
the way for the exultation over his reappearance as 
the ripe grain. The prayers for this return were among 
the most familiar of the old Babylonian penitentials, 
called, to use their term, "How longs." Here is an 
example: "How long will the springing up of verdure 
be withheld ? How long will vegetation be withheld ? ' ' 

A part of the ritual of the Tammuz feast was the 



120 Bible and Spade 

planting of the gardens. To the present day the peo- 
ple of Babylonia plant their gardens of vegetables in 
the mud left behind as the waters of the inundation 
recede. With such soil, and water and the torrid sun, 
these grow with amazing rapidity, bear their fruit and 
begin to perish as the mud, after a little, is baked dry 
by the burning sun. In the Semitic period Tammuz 
came to be associated with Shamash, the Sun-god, as 
his child, and it was perhaps through his solar relation 
that his cult spread westward, connecting with or ap- 
propriating the myths and cult of the midsummer god 
as Adonis, Lord. This cult won great popularity not 
only in Syria and Phoenicia, but even in Greece; and 
as the cult went westward its ritual continued in its 
essentials and in some of its details the same as that 
of the original Sumerian Tammuz of southern Baby- 
lonia. First, the wailing for the death of the god, who 
is the fertilization principle, his burial and his descent 
to the underworld, the search for him by a forlorn, 
loveless, lifeless world, 1 and then his joyful resurrection 
as the grain and the crops and all life, restored after 
its burial in the womb of the earth. Even the plant- 
ing of the gardens, which were a reality in Babylonia, 
was continued in the west under climatic conditions 
which made them unreal. In Babylonia the gardens 
of vegetables grew almost of themselves in the ooze of 
the receding floods. In the west they were artificial, 
practically useless growths of the speediest and most 
easily raised greens in shallow pots, sherds, etc., 

1 This is very vividly pictured in a well-known Babylonian 
liturgy commonly called "The Descent of Ishtar into Hades." 



History and Prophecy 121 

forced by watering under the hot sun. It is to this 
foreign cult, apparently fostered and popularized in 
Israel by the alliance with Damascus, that Isaiah refers 
in this prophecy. They have forgotten the God who 
really gives them victory; that Rock of whom the 
psalmists sung, the invincible fortress, and they are 
planting these foolish, artificial gardens of Adonis, an 
alien god, forcing the greens they plant by hotbed 
methods to bring about their ripening, only to wither 
instantly, a symbol of the cureless pain that should 
result to them from this infidelity toward their God. 
I do not think that the real meaning of this passage of 
the Adonis cult has been noticed by others, and indeed 
it is due to the discovery of the old liturgies from Baby- 
lonia that we are able fully to interpret this passage. 
In the time of Ezekiel (8 : 14) we find this cult appar- 
ently one of the secret and illicit cults in Jerusalem 
itself, and Ezekiel, in speaking of it, uses the old Su- 
merian name Tammuz. 

Next let me call your attention to a passage in the 
book of Jeremiah which gives us some important in- 
formation, and yet which in its present translation is, 
I think, quite, if not altogether, unintelligible. It is the 
thirty-second chapter of the book of Jeremiah, the pas- 
sage beginning with the eleventh verse. This passage 
tells us how, during the siege of Jerusalem by Nebu- 
chadrezzar, Jeremiah purchased a parcel of land in his 
home town Anathoth from Hanameel, his cousin, and 
they subscribed and sealed the record before witnesses 
who attached their seals and weighed out the money 
in scales. Then Jeremiah took the record of purchase, 



122 Bible and Spade 

the closed (the law and the statutes 1 ) and the open, and 
he gave the deed of purchase to Baruch, son of Neriah, 
in the presence of Hanameel his kinsman and in the 
presence of the witnesses who had witnessed the deed, 
and commanded that it should be put in an earthen 
pot and buried in the ground. Now at the time when 
this passage received its final touches the scribes did 
not understand what had been done, because customs 
had changed completely, so when they came to the 
statement of a deed sealed or closed, and open, they 
understood this as having a mystic reference to the 
Law, and one of them actually wrote on the margin of 
the copy, after the word sealed, the Law and the statutes. 
We find many such little notes, where scribes have tried 
to interpret the prophecies in the light of the Penta- 
teuch. Eliminate this note and the whole passage is 
clear. It is a description of the regular method of 
making contracts, deeds of sale, and the like in Baby- 
lonia. The contract was written on a clay tablet, 
which was closed or sealed by putting around it an 
envelope of clay, on which the substance of the con- 
tract was again written. Witnesses attached their 
seals to this, it was given to a banker or safe-deposit 
man, if we may so call him, who put it in an earthen 
jar for safe-keeping with other records and frequently 
or ordinarily buried it in the ground, which was the 
common safe deposit of the ordinary men in small 



1 This gloss is not in the old Greek translation known as the 
Septuagint, or LXX. The Greek Jeremiah is one-eighth smaller 
than the Hebrew. Passages occurring in the Hebrew only are 
under suspicion. 



History and Prophecy 123 

places. On fulfilment of the contract, the ordinary 
practice was to break off the outer clay envelope. We 
have found thousands of such documents in the various 
Babylonian towns and cities, dating from some time 
in the fourth millennium B. C. on up almost to the be- 
ginning of our era. It was in 1887, 1 think, that, read- 
ing the book of Jeremiah, I noticed for the first time 
the real meaning of this passage and presented my re- 
sults to the Biblical scholars of this country in session 
in June of the following year. A little later, visiting 
Professor Sayce in Oxford, I called his attention to the 
passage, my interpretation of it, and my prediction, as 
a result of that interpretation, that we should ulti- 
mately find in Palestine, as we had found in Babylonia, 
clay tablets containing records. He accepted my con- 
clusion instantly. Just at that time came the dis- 
covery at Tel el-Amarna of almost 400 clay tablets, 
letters from Egyptian governors, allies, and subject 
kings, from Babylonia, Assyria, Mesopotamia, Syria, 
and Palestine, but from a period almost 700 years be- 
fore Jeremiah's time. 

A further examination of the Bible and the use of 
words designating writing and books and the material 
for the same contained therein, shows that up to about 
700 B. C. clay tablets were used. By the close of the 
next century, in the time of Jeremiah, books were 
written on papyrus, as in Egypt, but contracts still 
continued to be written on clay tablets. If we could 
only put our spades in the right places, both in Pales- 
tine and in Babylonia, we should probably find con- 
temporary records of Israelitish and Jewish kings, 



124 Bible and Spade 

statesmen, and prophets, precisely as we have done in 
Babylonia. Heretofore we have had little success in 
doing this. Something less than ten clay tablets have 
been found in Palestinian explorations, the greater 
number from the period antedating the Hebrew con- 
quest, two from the time of Ashur-bani-pal of Assyria, 
one written by a resident Assyrian official of Gezer in 
Assyrian, but nothing in Hebrew, although some of the 
letters written from Jerusalem in the fourteenth cen- 
tury B. C. in the Babylonian language were evidently 
composed by people speaking the native Canaanitish 
or Hebrew language, and even have explanatory 
glosses in that language. 

I think that not only in Palestine but also in Baby- 
lonia we may hope to find clay tablets written by Jews. 
Excavating at Nippur, we had the good fortune to dis- 
cover a number of tablets the witnesses to which were, 
evidently Jews. They bore such familiar Bible names 
as Adoram and Gadaliah, Haggai and Hammaniah, 
Menahem and Mattaniah, Benjamin, Nathaniel, Sim- 
eon, and others of the same sort. We already knew 
from objects found in Nippur that that ancient city 
was the site of a considerable Jewish settlement in 
the post-Christian period; the names on these tablets 
showed us that there must have been many Jews in 
that immediate neighborhood shortly after the Exile. 
Now, in the book of Ezekiel, we are told that the Jewish 
captives were settled by the river Kebar or Chebar, 
in the land of the Chaldeans, by the side of which was 
the ruined mound of Abib. The tablets containing 
these Jewish names found in Nippur contained also the 



History and Prophecy 125 

mention of the canal Kabaru, which is the Babylonian 
form of the Hebrew Kebar, in or close to Nippur. I 
have always dreamed that some day when we complete 
those excavations at Nippur we shall find a Jewish 
synagogue or some sort of place of worship, and clay 
tablets containing sections of the Pentateuch or of the 
Psalms, or it may be even of the prophecies. What a 
find that would be ! 

The Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions thus in 
many ways elucidate and, to use a common expression, 
confirm the narrative of the Bible, and the prophets. 
It was supposed that, this being the case, they would 
peculiarly elucidate and confirm the book of Daniel, 
and indeed the editors of the great International Com- 
mentary assigned the book of Daniel to me on the 
ground that a commentary on that book should be 
written by one familiar with Babylonian records. As 
I hope to show, those records do elucidate the book of 
Daniel, but so far from confirming in the ordinary sense 
the historic character of that book, they show us that 
history is strangely turned about and confused in it. 
Belshazzar is in our book of Daniel the son of Nebu- 
chadrezzar and his successor as king of Babylon. 
Babylon is taken in his reign by Darius the Mede and 
destroyed. Now, in point of fact, there were several 
kings between Nebuchadrezzar and Belshazzar, and 
Belshazzar was not king of Babylon, but the son of 
King Nabonidus, who was no blood relation whatever 
to Nebuchadrezzar, whom he succeeded with several 
reigns between. Belshazzar was not king but crown 
prince. Nabonidus, a priest by origin, was the pacifist 



126 Bible and Spade 

king to whom I have alluded before, interested in ex- 
ploring the antiquities of the past and reforming the 
religion of the present. Belshazzar, his son, was as- 
signed an important part in the government. At 
least, in the records we have continual mention of 
Belshazzar as in this place or that, when Nabonidus 
was in some other place. It was Cyrus the Persian and 
not Darius the Mede who took Babylon, put an end 
to Nabonidus's reign, and perhaps slew Belshazzar; 
but, so far from destroying Babylon, he treated it with 
great favor. Apparently the Babylonian priests of the 
temple of Marduk, outraged by Nabonidus's reforms, 
made his victory possible; and Cyrus's inscriptions 
show us that he ascribed his victory to Marduk. 
What then is the meaning of the statements in the 
book of Daniel? Are they pure fabrications? 

On the rocks in the pass of Behistun, on the road from 
Babylonia to Persia, the Persian king, Darius, a suc- 
cessor of Cyrus but of a different family, engraved a 
monumental inscription. For this purpose the rock 
was carefully smoothed, all faulty places were cut out 
and filled in with strong smooth stone, and the whole 
surface brought to a high finish. It must have been a 
colossal work, for the bottom of the inscription is 300 
feet above the floor of the pass. On this rock Darius 
inscribed in three languages the account of his wars 
and his victories. It was the inscriptions in Persian 
and Babylonian which Sir Henry Rawlinson deci- 
phered, and which thus became the key to and the 
foundation of all following interpretations of Babylon- 
ian and Assyrian inscriptions. From the Behistun in- 



History and Prophecy 127 

scription it appears that at the beginning of his reign 
Darius had to meet and put down innumerable revolts 
in all parts of his domains. Two of these revolts were 
in Babylonia. Darius says: "Further there was a 
Babylonian, Nidintubel his name, — who rebelled in 
Babylon, lying to the people and saying, 'I am Neb- 
uchadrezzar, son of Nabonidus/ Then all the Baby- 
lonians went over to that Nidintubel, Babylon re- 
belled; he made himself king over Babylon." Darius 
marched to Babylon and joined battle with the pre- 
tender. He won the victory and pursued the pretender 
to Babylon, which he took, capturing and slaying him. 
But a little later, while Darius was in Persia and Media 
putting down revolts there, the Babylonians again 
rebelled under a certain Arakhu, an Armenian, who 
"deceived the people of Babylon, saying: 'I am 
Nebuchadrezzar, son of Nabonidus/ Thereupon, the 
people of Babylon rebelled against me and went over 
to this Arakhu. He took Babylon; he became king in 
Babylon." This time Darius sent an army against 
Babylon and, as he says, by the help of Ormuzd, won 
the victory, "took Babylon, smote the army of Baby- 
lon, the rebels, and took them captive." We have, 
furthermore, contract tablets from the reign of one of 
these Nebuchadrezzars," presumably the second, show- 
ing that he reigned about two years. 

Now from Herodotus we learn that Darius did very 
severely punish Babylon at the time of this second 
rebellion. His treatment of it was quite unlike that 
friendly treatment which Cyrus had accorded it, pre- 
cisely as the attitude of Babylon toward him was differ- 



128 Bible and Spade 

ent from that of Babylon toward Cyrus. The reason 
for this is clear. Cyrus came in agreement with the 
priests of Marduk, ascribing his victory to Marduk. 
Darius was a Zoroastrian, alien in race and hostile 
in faith to Babylon and Marduk, and he ascribes 
his victory to Ormuzd. Now observe that both 
these pretenders called themselves by the name of 
Nebuchadrezzar. They professed to be a sort of 
Nebuchadrezzar redivivus, that same story of strange 
expectation which showed itself in Britain looking for 
the return of an Arthur, in Germany looking for the 
return of a Charlemagne or a Frederick Barbarossa, 
or even, if we may use that comparison, the Roman 
empire looking for the return of Nero, the last of the 
great Caesar's descendants. From the book of Daniel 
we see what the name Nebuchadrezzar meant, what 
legends gathered about him. He was the great man of 
Babylon, and the recent excavations of Babylon itself 
have shown his title to greatness. He was the great 
man of his day about whom all thought centred. 
When one spoke of Babylon, one thought of Nebu- 
chadrezzar and one thought naturally, also, when the 
capture of Babylon was spoken of, not of Cyrus, for 
his capture of it was, as stated, one which amounted to 
nothing, but of its capture by Darius, which involved 
a terrible punishment; and the distinction between 
Cyrus, whose attitude toward the religion of Babylon 
was friendly, and Darius, whose attitude was hostile, 
is marked by the term Median, applied to the latter. 
He was different from Cyrus; if, then, Cyrus were Per- 
sian, Darius must belong to that old Median kingdom 



History and Prophecy 129 

which had played so great a part a little before the time 
of Cyrus, and of which Cyrus's kingdom was the heir. 

This is the method of folk history. I found a most 
interesting exhibition of this in exploring a good many 
years ago the folk-lore of the Wends, a little enclave of 
Slavonic peoples on the borders of Prussia and Saxony, 
retaining, in the midst of their German surroundings, 
a part at least of their Slavonic identity, both in lan- 
guage and in customs. They had a number of stories 
which we know as Grimm's fairy-tales, but which ap- 
peared among them in a peculiar form. Mixed up 
with the old bogies and mythical legendary figures of 
the fairy-stories, as we know them, are Frederick the 
Great of Prussia and his general, Ziethen. Folk-lore 
knows no time. All ages are apt to be confused in it. 
It figures the great episodes. Those things which 
made a deep impression are held on to and passed down 
as part of the folk tradition, mixed in with the old, 
old stories which we call fairy-tales. The great man 
which that part of the country knew, whom it felt and 
experienced, was Frederick the Great, and next to him 
his Hussar general, Ziethen. Here we have in the book 
of Daniel precisely the same sort of thing. 

I should like to tell you also about the story of the 
three children thrust into the fiery furnace by Nebu- 
chadrezzar, reference to which actually appears in the 
book of Jeremiah, 1 and much more, did time permit. 
But if these things are not history, one may say, what 
place have they in an inspired book ? They are history, 
but they are history of different sort from that re- 

1 Jer. 29 : 21, 22. 



130 Bible and Spade 

corded in Woodrow Wilson's history of the United 
States, for instance. You must broaden your concep- 
tion of history, as I tried to show in dealing with the 
early stories of Genesis. History you can get out of 
this book. It was never meant to tell you history in 
the sense that Woodrow Wilson tells you the history of 
the United States; but if you will use it for what it 
was intended to be used for and what it should be used 
for, you will find that our new knowledge has made it 
a new and vastly greater book. It is one of the stir- 
ring books of the Old Testament. All these tales and 
stories, woven in with the history of the past, had been 
handed down among the people, not in Hebrew, for the 
people had ceased to speak Hebrew as their common 
tongue, but in Aramaean. Then came the persecution 
of the Jews under Antiochus Epiphanes, when nation 
and religion alike approached extinction, and there 
arose that grand old man Mattathias, the faithful 
priest, with his five valiant sons, who dared not only 
to refuse to sacrifice to the heathen god, but who killed 
on the altar the official sent to compel the people of his 
home town, Modin, to sacrifice. And then they fled to 
the mountains, and the old man succumbed to the 
hardships, but his valiant sons continued the struggle, 
until at last they won not only freedom and the re- 
establishment of the religion of Israel, but national in- 
dependence and a strong kingdom. But one of the 
great agents in this, the man who helped with his pen 
and with his tongue, was the writer who took those old 
tales with their stories of faith and heroism and pro- 
mulgated them in a new way, the way of the new proph- 



History and Prophecy 131 

ecy, which inspired the people with courage to resist, 
which convinced them that their God would be with 
them as He had been in the old times of which the 
stories told. 

I would like to dwell longer on this book of Daniel, 
but I may here add only this, that one-half of it, 
that which we commonly call the Apocalypse, was not 
written in Aramaean, like the folk-tales, but in Hebrew, 
for with the revival of Judaism came the attempt to 
restore the ancient sacred language. But wisely did 
the great writer, whatever his name may be, we know 
not, combine the old folk stories, in the folk tongue, 
with the glorious spiritual meaning he put into them, 
with his new vision, written in the sacred language of 
his people, the beginning of that apocalyptic, or vision 
of the future, which in the Bible ends with the Reve- 
lation of Saint John the Divine. Daniel is a grand 
book I — . 



IV 

HEBREW PSALMODY 

Recent New Testament criticism has tended, on the 
whole, strongly toward conservatism, the restoration of 
the old traditions of the authorship of the Gospels and 
of the Epistles of Saint Paul. These receive an early 
date in the latest literature on the New Testament. 
Its method of treatment of the text also tends to be 
scientific and careful, demanding objective evidence 
before making changes, refusing to yield to the fasci- 
nations of subjective speculation. The tendency of 
recent Old Testament criticism has seemed to be rather 
the opposite. There are, it is true, a number of voices 
raised in protest against the methods of the latter-day 
school of critics, but these, so far at least as sound is 
concerned, still seem to be in the majority. Their 
tendency is to divide up every book of the Old Testa- 
ment into as many fragments as possible, to reject all 
traditions as worthless, and to substitute for them 
speculations of their own. Their treatment of the 
text is the treatment of subjective speculation. This 
one emends the text because he thinks that, at the day 
at which he supposes the w^ords were written, the writer 
must have said something quite different; or because it 
does not correspond with his idea of proper outward 

form. If it is poetry, he knows the methods of He- 

132 



• Hebrew Psalmody 133 

brew poetry, which he has evolved out of his brain and 
study, and he makes the Hebrew text fit his theory. 
Now this is, of course, a natural reaction against the 
extreme literalism of former ages. They accepted the 
evidence of any sort of tradition without investigation, 
and their treatment of the Hebrew Masoretic 1 text 
was that God had made his angels write the book in 
heaven and had personally seen to it that every dot 
and point was put in its proper place. The one extreme 
is as bad as the other. We used to be taught the dogma 
of an infallible text, and sacrosanct tradition to be 
accepted literally, and now we are in the reaction which 
resulted from that false extreme. 

The book that has been the worst mishandled of all 
books in the Old Testament is the book of Psalms, 
and each succeeding commentator has surpassed in 
this his predecessors. But that is an exaggeration. I 
think the limit was reached by the late Professor Cheyne 
of Oxford, a most lovable, sweet Christian soul, a most 
distinguished scholar, whose mind was so acute and 
original that he could not be content with anything 
on earth, and invented new places for himself. His 
early work on the Psalms was good, but in his last 
book his translations are absolutely unidentifiable 
with the Psalms as you know them in English, or as I 
know them in Hebrew. He has substituted new coun- 

1 The Hebrew was written in consonants only. This was the 
Bible of the Greek translation and of the time of Christ. In 
the early Christian centuries the Hebrew scribes added the vowel 
points, and various notes and punctuations. These are known 
as the Masorah, and the Hebrew consonantal text with this 
Masorah added is the Masoretic text. 



134 Bible and Spade ! 

tries for those that are told of in the Bible/ countries 
that no one but himself ever heard of, especially a cer- 
tain Jerahmeel. Compare the translation in one of 
his earlier books of the first two or three lines of the 
second stanza of the 42d Psalm, with his latest transla- 
tion taken from the imagined Psalms which he ulti- 
mately evolved out of the Psalter: 

"My soul upon me is bowed down; therefore will I think upon 
Thee, from the land of Jordan and of Hermonim, from the 
little mountain. 

Flood calls unto flood at the sound of thy cataracts, all thy 
breakers and billows have gone over me." 

Here is the translation of the same from Cheyne's 
later revised text: 

"Preserve me (O Yahwe) my God, from the tribes of the 

Arabians, 
From the race of the Jerahmeelites rescue thou me. 
Rouse thee, O God of my succour; why dost thou forget me, 
While I walk tremblingly, | the Arabians pressing me hard?" 

Other recent commentators do not, however, stand 
so far behind. Professor Briggs, who did such notable 
work for Biblical scholarship in other fields, in his com- 
mentary in the International Series changed the text 
of practically every Psalm in the Psalter, and in many 
cases very considerably, partly because of his concep- 
tion of psalmody and his theories of the date and oc- 
casion of the various Psalms, partly because he had 
evolved a scheme of Hebrew poetry with which the 
Psalms did not agree. Like a schoolmaster correcting 



Hebrew Psalmody 135 

the exercises of his pupils, he calls up each Psalm in turn 
and corrects its poetry, not only excising words which 
will not fit into his scheme of measure, but mercilessly 
cutting off whole verses, or transposing their members, 
thus producing a machine-like evenness which will 
scarcely appeal to those who have loved the Psalms for 
their quaint and varied rhythm. He has made the 
text conform to the exigencies of his metrical system. 
Kent of Yale, who has put forth so many books which 
are so abundantly used in schools and colleges, has 
followed Briggs in some of the most objectionable fea- 
tures of his commentary in his book of Songs, Hymns, 
and Prayers of the Old Testament 

One radical error which we find in all these commen- 
taries is the false conception of the purpose of the 
Psalter, as though it were a collection of poems by some 
court poet and not a collection of liturgies, chants, and 
hymns for the temple or synagogue services. So the 
critics have sought to attach each Psalm to some par- 
ticular historical event, and have imagined some poet 
wandering off to this place or that and composing an 
effusion about the king or for the king, dealing with con- 
temporary events. Take up your own church hymn- 
book and examine it. Take up the great chants of the 
Christian Church which have come down through the 
ages, the Te Deum, the Magnificat, the Nunc Dimittis, 
the Gloria in Excelsis. What sort of fate would they 
have if you treated them so? Luther's hymns or 
Wesley's hymns are magnificent hymns, yet you get 
no allusions in them to outside events. They are 
concerned with the soul of man and with the exigencies 



7 

136 Bible and Spade 

of worship. This is the line from which one must 
examine the Psalter. Prophecies are concerned with 
outside events. You may feel sure that you have not 
comprehended your prophecy unless you have identified 
its connection with contemporary political, social, or 
economic events or conditions. With the Psalter the 
situation is exactly the reverse. 

Again, these writers have failed to study and ap- 
propriate the great mass of ancient liturgies of a char- 
acter and form very close to the Hebrew which have 
been unearthed in Babylonia in the recent years, and 
which throw a perfect flood of light on the outward 
form, the ritual use, the thought and ideas of our He- 
brew Psalter. Let me take one single instance of com- 
plete misunderstanding resulting from this. These 
modern critics have brought the Psalter down to a very, 
very late period, and one of their grounds for dating 
it so late is the emphasis which it puts on the poor and 
needy. Israel is the pious, Israel is the poor, the needy, 
the humble. The heathen are the godless. The 
heathen are the rich and mighty. These conditions, 
said they, show a time when the Jews were a poor, 
petty people, downtrodden, and crying out of their 
humility and their need, developing piety in place of 
patriotism and relying on petitions to God rather than 
on force of arms. 

Let me read you first a few lines from some hymns 
and prayers found in the Theban Necropolis dating 
from about 1350 to 1200 B. C, at, or before the time of 
Moses. The general spirit of these hymns, praying 
for deliverance from trouble caused by their own sins 



Hebreiv Psalmody 137 

and from the bondage resulting from those sins, setting 
forth the sweetness of the love and mercy of God, with 
an ardent desire to make this known to all men, re- 
minds one much of our Psalms. 

Amen-Re is the god addressed, "the lord to him that 
calls upon him," "who comes at the voice of the dis- 
tressed humble one; who gives breath to him who is 
wretched." Hear now this prayer in which the peti- 
tioner, representing himself as an humble man, calls 
on Amen-Re: 

"Who comes at the voice of the humble man. 
I call upon thee when I am in distress: 
And thou comest that thou mayest save me: 
That thou mayest give breath to him that is wretched, 
That thou mayest save me that am in bondage." 

Still much more striking is the resemblance in this 
regard of the old Sumerian liturgies and rituals to the 
Hebrew. Of the ritual we have evidence in a number 
of representations of the worshipping king approach- 
ing the god, on various seal cylinders and tablets. The 
god regularly sits upon his throne. The king, repre- 
sented as a most lowly penitent and clothed accord- 
ingly, is brought before him by a priest who leads him 
by the hand. The liturgies for this ritual which have 
come down to us are very numerous. The petitioner, 
whoever he may be (and in many, if not in most cases, 
these liturgies are for royal suppliants), must identify 
himself with the poor, the needy, and afflicted, and 
designate himself as poor, needy, afflicted, and the 
like, when he comes as a suppliant to the god. On the 



138 Bible and Spade 

other hand, the enemy against whom he directs his 
prayer is regularly represented as the rich or mighty, 
precisely as in the Hebrew Psalms. How old this use 
is, which recent Psalm critics have called late, may be 
seen from the fact that the earliest penitentials of this 
sort that we possess date from somewhere about 
3000 B. C. And we have such liturgies from that date 
until about 97 B. C, always in the same ancient church 
language, the Sumerian. These were copied from age 
to age, and we can detect little changes that were made 
from time to time. A liturgy originally intended for 
use in the shrine of Enlil at Nippur is made available 
for use in other shrines by the insertion of local or 
divine names appropriate to those shrines. The 
liturgy originally written for one god may be made 
appropriate for the service of another god in the same 
way. There are liturgies in which place is left to in- 
sert the name of some different or additional god; a 
number of gods are mentioned and then an unknown 
god or goddess. There were a number of scribes 
connected with each Babylonian temple, busy in ob- 
taining, collecting, and transcribing liturgies for that 
temple, and the older the liturgy the more highly it 
seems to have been esteemed. 

We have in one of our Psalms curious evidence, 
hitherto overlooked, that in the temple at Jerusalem 
the same loving care was expended on acquiring, 
copying, and transmitting liturgies. The 88th Psalm 
is peculiar in the whole Psalter, first because it has 
two headings, ascribing it to different authors or choir 
guilds, the Sons of Korah, and Heman the Ezrahite, 



Hebrew Psalmody 139 

respectively, and designating it for different uses, the 
one, accompanied by the flute for making penance, 
and the other, for a form of responsive recitative much 
favored in Israel, called maskil; and secondly because 
it is the one pessimistic Psalm in the Psalter. Every 
other Psalm assumes a favorable answer to the peti- 
tions offered to God, and the acceptance of the sacri- 
fice connected therewith. Moreover, this Psalm lacks 
organization. Regularly Psalms are developed after 
a certain general method, setting forth the troubles 
and disasters of the petitioner, indicating the enemy 
from whom they come, sometimes two or three times 
over and with less or greater detail, finally assuming 
the favor of God toward the worshipper, and acceptance 
of the sacrifice, with declaration of the same by the 
sacrificing priest; then perhaps a curse against the evil- 
doers, with rejoicing of the petitioner for his deliver- 
ance, and at the end, and sometimes at other points, 
according to the number of sacrifices, outbursts of 
sacrificial shouts, followed by a benediction. In this 
Psalm, however, there is simply a continuous repeti- 
tion of the woes of the petitioner, with no proper end- 
ing. When you come to the point where you expect 
to proceed to God's answer to the prayer, you find 
these words (8th verse, American Revision) : 

fi I am shut up and I cannot come forth." 

Then starts another lamentation, the last verse of 
which closes thus: "Lover and friend hast thou put 
far from me, and mine acquaintance — darkness," which 
is both incomplete and grammatically unintelligible. 



140 Bible and Spade 

Now, "I am shut up and I cannot come forth " is, 
literally translated, "Finished, does not go on." That 
is the same sort of note, not in the same words, but 
expressing the same sense, which we find in Babylon- 
ian tablets where the tablet was broken or injured and 
the copyist could read no further. The text came to 
an end. The first eight verses are, in fact, a fragment 
of a Psalm. The second half is another fragment. 
The scribe came to the middle of a verse where his 
tablet or his manuscript was broken or defaced, he 
could decipher nothing further, and simply wrote 
"darkness," that is "unintelligible." But these two 
fragments of Psalms were lovingly preserved, carefully 
copied, and kept in the temple library at Jerusalem. 
The two fragments were copied on one tablet, or one 
sheet of papyrus, and the headings of both Psalms, 
with the musical directions and the designations of 
the choir guild from which they were derived, placed 
at the top. Old things were especially valuable and 
might not be thrown away. They might, however, be 
changed and adapted for new occasions, of which we 
find abundant evidence in the Hebrew Psalms as in 
the Babylonian. 

Until those Babylonian liturgies were unearthed and 
translated, we had supposed that Hebrew poetry was 
quite sui generis. The characteristic mark of Hebrew 
poetry is not metre, in the sense of balanced verse with 
a certain number and order of syllables and quantities; 
it is not rhyme or alliteration, like the old Saxon; 
but what we call parallelism. The same idea is re- 
peated in different forms, or different ideas are repeated 



Hebrew Psalmody 141 

in the same form. That is the essential element of 
Hebrew poetry. You may find occasional rhyme, 
and occasional alliteration, or rather, assonance, i. e., 
the juxtaposition and accumulation of the same or 
similar sounds. There is always, also, a rough beat, 
count; but those things are secondary and incidental. 
The. essential element of Hebrew poetry is alliteration. 
The same thing is true of Babylonian and Assyrian 
poetry. Here are a few examples: 



If I put anything down, it is snatched away, 

If I do more than is expected, who will repay me? 



"He has dug a well where no water is, 
He has raised a husk without kernel." 



Does a marsh receive the price of its reeds; 
Or fields the price of their vegetation ? " 



"The strong live by their own wages; 
The weak by the wages of their children." l 

These examples are not taken from Babylonian psalms, 
but from Babylonian proverbs, for the literature of 
Babylonia was in scope also curiously like the Hebrew 
literature which has come down to us in the Bible. 
They had a wisdom literature, like the Hebrew, con- 
sisting both of proverbs, like our book of Proverbs, and 
of problem discussions, like our book of Job. I have 
given these examples of poetic form from their proverbs 
rather than from their liturgies, because, while the 
poetry of the liturgies is identical in principle with the 

1 Barton, Archceology and the Bible. 



142 Bible and Spade 

poetry of the Hebrew Psalter, the resemblance is apt 
to be obscured by the introduction of ritual cries or 
rubrical notes, as also by the repetition ad infinitum of 
the names of gods and goddesses. 

The ritual cries and the formulae of the Babylonian 
liturgies are as strikingly similar to the Hebrew as is 
the form of the poetry. A marked characteristic of 
the old Sumerian hvmns is the series of honorific names 
with which they frequently commence, those of Enlil, 
the great god of Nippur, being nine in number, fairly 
well conventionalized and traditionalized. Turn to one 
of the great and early Psalms of the Hebrew Psalter, 
the 18th Psalm, which appears also in a slightly vari- 
ant form in the twenty-second chapter of the second 
book of Samuel, and observe how this begins with a 
succession of honorific names. Yahaweh is addressed 
as the suppliant's Rock, Fortress, Deliverer, God, Cliff, 
Shield, Horn of Salvation, High Tower, Refuge, Savior. 
Apparently here also there are nine honorific names; 
perhaps ten, but it is a little uncertain whether certain 
words are epithets of a name, or independent names. 
The object of this use of honorific names is clear to 
any one who is used to liturgical formulae, for it is some- 
thing that we have carried down in liturgies to our own 
time. I suppose the original thought was to appease 
the god who is addressed by telling of his glory and 
his honor, precisely as one might appease an earthly 
king. We have not probably that intention in our 
modern use, but it is a natural inclination to sing the 
praises of him whom we address, to "magnify" him, 
to use our common word. This Psalm is the most 



J 



Hebrew Psalmody 143 

conspicuous instance of the introduction of the peti- 
tions of the liturgy by the recital of numerous names 
or magnificent epithets of the deity and there is no 
other case where we have so many names put together, 
but a similar use is frequent in the Psalms, sometimes 
at the beginning of the whole, sometimes at the begin- 
ning of some new motive of the liturgy. 

One striking minor liturgical phrase which is common 
to the old Sumerian psalms with the Hebrew, is the 
"How long," or, to use the fuller Sumerian phrase, 
"How long the heart." This is used in the Hebrew 
precisely as it is used in the Sumerian psalms. It 
belongs to a class of liturgies which Assyriologists have 
designated as penitentials. This was a well-under- 
stood liturgical formula of very ancient use, connoting 
in itself a whole phrase or thought. Hence in actual 
use it stands quite by itself, a mere cry, both in the 
Sumerian and in the Hebrew. The best instance of 
its ritual value in the Hebrew is Psalm 13, which com- 
mences with four "How longs." So characteristic 
of the penitential psalms was this cry that both Su- 
merian and Hebrew named them "How longs." We 
have an instance of this in the 74th Psalm (v. 9). 

In the old Sumerian liturgies you frequently find a 
psalm commencing with a half verse, which is really 
the caption of the psalm, by which it was designated. 
Precisely the same is true of the Hebrew. You have 
a very striking instance of this in Psalm 68. That is 
a great triumph hymn, a processional liturgy, based on 
the old Ark song of the book of Numbers, picturing the 
march of Israel into and its conquest of Canaan. 



144 Bible and Spade 

Israel is, of course, called the poor, the lowly, the needy, 
the technical phrase which we have already noticed. 
In the eleventh verse we find these words (American 
Revision) : 

"The Lord giveth the word; 
The women that publish the tidings are a great host," 

which are really a rubric directing the great host of 
women singers to sing at this point. Then follows a 
succession of lines, each one of which is intelligible in 
itself, but no one of which has any relation to what 
follows: 

"Kings of armies flee, they flee; 
And she that tarrieth at home divideth the spoiL ,, 

"When ye lie among the sheepfolds." 

"The wings of a dove covered with silver, 
And her pinions with yellow gold." 

"When the Almighty scattered kings therein." 

"It snoweth in Zalmon." 

These are the songs, five in all, which the rubric directs 
the women to sing, each being named by its first line, 
precisely as in the Sumerian psalmody, where we have 
also similar liturgical motives, and where liturgies were 
apt to consist of five psalms or songs. 

The Sumerian psalms were associated also with the 
use of certain instruments of music, that is to say, 
some psalms are ordered to be accompanied by the 
flute, others by some other sort of instrument. The 



Hebrew Psalmody 145 

headings of the Hebrew Psalms show us the same use, 
the flute for one Psalm, the harp for another, etc. 

Other ritual notes, in both Sumerian and Hebrew 
Psalms, indicate the time and sometimes the nature of 
the sacrifice, with cries to God to show himself, to 
"lighten" upon them (that is, in the sacrificial fire), to 
"stand up," "stretch forth his arm," and much more. 
We find at the close of some of the Babylonian hymns 
reference to the offerings which are presented, evidently 
marking the point in the liturgy where those are to be 
presented, just as also in the Hebrew. There are other 
similar indications of various ritual acts, ablutions, 
prostrations, etc., in both. The 118th Psalm affords 
perhaps the best example from which to study ritual 
and liturgy together in the entire Psalter. It is a 
thank-offering hymn, and a great processional, as are 
many of the Babylonian liturgies, and as in those pro- 
cessional liturgies we are able to follow the ritual by the 
allusions, so are we also in this 118th Psalm, Begin- 
ning outside the temple, we can see how the procession 
proceeds from place to place and court to court, per- 
forming certain ritual acts, until finally they come to 
the high altar for the great sacrifice. The twenty- 
seventh verse reads: "The Lord is God and He hath 
given us light," which marks the kindling of the sacri- 
ficial fire. Then we have a rubric: "Bind the sacrifice 
with cords, even to the horns of the altar" (which is 
now recited or sung by us, as the case may be, as 
though it were a constituent part of the Psalm). Then 
a thank cry: "Thou art my God and I will thank thee; 
Thou art my God and I will exalt thee," followed by 



146 Bible and Spade 

the old ritual cry, to be used when the thank-offering 
victim was offered, which had come down from time 
immemorial: "Oh, give thanks unto the Lord for He is 
good, for His loving kindness is forever." 

Time would not suffice to indicate all the points of 
resemblance between the Babylonian and Hebrew 
liturgies, such as the designation of God as Shepherd, 
Bull, Hero, and the like. More striking, perhaps, are 
certain of the spiritual resemblances such as are sug- 
gested in the phrase: "From the rising of the sun to the 
setting of the sun," or the use of word, or breath or 
wind, as the agent of action by God. But I do not 
want to burden you with too many details. I have 
already indicated how in the case of the great sacrificial 
processionals of the high feast-days comparison of 
the Babylonian liturgies has enabled us to identify 
the action and the accompanying ritual of the Hebrew, 
and the reverse is also the case, comparison with the 
Hebrew helps to determine the meaning and the ac- 
tion of the Babylonian hymns. This is true also of 
the penitentials. The 6th Psalm of our Psalter is 
the first of the Hebrew penitentials. It is almost 
identical in its method with the Babylonian peniten- 
tials, and indeed it was the ritual analysis of a Baby- 
lonian penitential by Jastrow in his Religion of Baby- 
lonia and Assyria that first gave me the clue to the 
Hebrew use. In both rituals the penitent and the 
priest alternate in their address, the penitent, as 
taught, setting forth his need, and the priest, as ritual 
expert, offering the correct prayers. The penitent 
comes before God, led by the priest, who expounds to 



Hebrew Psalmody 147 

God why the penitent's confession and sacrifice should 
be accepted. In the Hebrew this goes on for seven 
verses, and you can determine pretty well the priest's 
part and the suppliant's part in it. Then comes the 
offering of the sacrifice, the acceptance of the same and 
the announcement of forgiveness. This is followed by 
a burst of praise and exultation, and that by the curse 
on the foes through whose wicked machinations ca- 
lamity had been brought on the suppliant. In some 
of these rituals the parts, or at least the complaint, 
confession, and supplication, are repeated several times 
over in slightly variant form. 

In the 7th Psalm, as the heading tells us, we have 
the liturgy to accompany the ritual for the unwitting 
sin (Lev. 4), that is, a penitential to be used where a 
man is stricken or afflicted in some way by sickness, 
or calamity of such sort as is evidence of the wrath of 
God, but cannot put his finger on anything which he 
has committed which could have caused such punish- 
ment. In both Babylonian and Hebrew we have 
liturgies for use to appease God in such case. Here 
also the man must make confession of sinfulness and 
offer an atonement, even though proclaiming that he 
knows not in what he has transgressed. 

One more point of resemblance has recently come to 
my attention through the publication by Professor 
Barton of a number of Sumerian liturgies discovered 
at Nippur. The old Sumerian kings of Babylonia 
were deified. We have several hymns from the city 
of Ur, liturgies for the sacrifice offered to the deified 
king at his birthday, his accession day, or some such 



148 Bible and Spade 

occasion. Those hymns set forth incidentally the 
Sumerian idea of the obligations and duties of the 
king, and they are most strikingly like two Psalms of 
the Hebrew Psalter, the 72d and the 2d. These two 
Psalms were incorporated in the Psalter when the old 
Davidic hymn-book, 3-41, and the new Davidic col- 
lection of penitentials, 51-71, were joined together to 
constitute one great David psalm-book. Psalm 2 was 
prefixed as the introduction, Psalm 72 added as the 
conclusion of the new Davidic Psalter, the prayers of 
David Son of Jesse, thus formed. Both are what we 
call Messianic. The first of them almost deifies the 
ideal king there described. He is the great victor, he 
is the son of God, he is half, if not altogether, divine. 
The second describes the obligations and duties of the 
ideal king, how he is to bring prosperity to his land, 
and how he is to care for the poor and needy. We 
have both these things in those old liturgies to the 
kings of Ur. 

I have spoken already of the way in which the Baby- 
lonians loved to preserve the ancient things, the an- 
cient forms, which were kept through almost 3,000 
years, the old names and old ritual expressions. You 
will find the same thing in the Hebrew. It is in the 
Psalms that you get the old names of the Almighty, 
and even in the very latest liturgies you find God 
addressed by his ancient and for all other purposes 
superseded name, Yahu. 

I would not have you think that the Hebrew has 
simply borrowed in all this from the Sumerian, nor 
would I have you think Sumerian psalmody is on a 
plane with the Hebrew. As I said with regard to 



Hebrew Psalmody 149 

Hebrew cosmogony, and Hebrew folk-lore, the spiritual 
differences are vastly greater than the outward resem- 
blances. You have, it is true, Egyptian and Baby- 
lonian hymns of spiritual elevation and great beauty, 
in the former case referable to Ikhnaton, the reformer 
king, and monotheistic Sun-worshipper. Indeed you 
will find that heathen hymns of high spirituality are 
always addressed to the Sun-god. The worship of the 
Sun-god, for some reason, seems to have been the purest 
and the most exalted in ancient religions. But such 
hymns are very few and far between. The ordinary 
Babylonian hymns repeat over and over again the 
names and epithets of indefinite gods and goddesses. 
Unless you are looking for some little suggestions 
about ritual and worship, you will probably be bored 
or even repelled by most of them. You would say to 
yourself, "How foolish and how degrading"; but still 
more will you say this when you take the liturgies 
designed for the obscene sex cult of some of the great 
festivals, so gross, so disgusting their utterances would 
seem to you. The Hebrew Psalms are by general 
consent the greatest hymn-book ever written. Their 
wonderful power and spirituality have affected genera- 
tions with greatly different religious conceptions and 
varied standards of civilization, and still they continue 
to be a power to uplift and to comfort men's souls. 
This, the really important side of Hebrew psalmody, 
I have not brought before you in this lecture. I have 
been trying to show you rather how to evaluate the 
Hebrew Psalter in relation to Hebrew history and the 
growth of Hebrew religion. 
And now, what is the relation of Hebrew psalmody 



150 Bible and Spade 

to that ancient psalmody of the Sumerian Babylonians 
with which we have been comparing it? The resem- 
blances are most striking, and yet it is not a case of a 
borrowing of the Hebrew from the Sumerian. In a 
former lecture I spoke to you about the inhabitants of 
Babylonia. The oldest civilization was that of the 
Sumerians, occupying southern Babylonia. They were 
the inventors of the script which we call cuneiform, in 
which all Babylonian and Assyrian inscriptions are 
written. As I have pointed out, their name for temple 
was carried over into the Babylonian Semitic tongue, 
and appears as the name for temple, not only in Baby- 
lonia, but as far westward as Palestine. We have seen 
that their language remained the sacred church lan- 
guage in Babylonia and Assyria down almost, if not 
quite, to the beginning of our era; that their old psalms 
were sung in the temples and at the sacrifices in the 
old Sumerian tongue, which had long become not 
understandable by the people. The same is true of 
magic. The names of demons, and technical terms 
which we find in sorceries and incantations, go back 
to the Sumerian, just as in the case of the word tem- 
ple. So we find, both in the Hebrew Bible and in later 
Jewish incantations, names and terms of Sumerian 
magic. 

Sometime about, or a little before 3000 B. C, we find 
Semitic peoples pushing down into Babylonia and by 
the end of the next millennium, somewhat before 2000 
B. C, we find that they have become the dominating 
people. The civilization which we call Babylonian, 
and the people which we call Babylonian, and the 




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Hebrew Psalmody 151 

religion which we call Babylonian, are a combination 
of the Semitic and the Sumerian, just as in Egypt we 
observed that the Egyptians and the Egyptian civi- 
lization are a compound. This civilization affected 
the whole west, because the west was Semitic. Its 
gods, its folk-lore, its legends, its myths were closely 
related to those of Assyria and Babylonia. Therefore 
the west land was peculiarly susceptible to influences 
from Babylonia. It both gave and took, until the 
same civilization and the same cult, with a difference 
of thickness, if I may so express it, varying shades 
of local color, were stretched over the whole region from 
the Persian Mountains to the Mediterranean Sea. 
That is the reason why we find such striking resem- 
blances between Hebrew and Babylonian cosmogony, 
and that is the reason also why we find the same prac- 
tices and methods of psalmody, even down to pecu- 
liarities of ritual expression, in Babylonia and in Israel. 
When the Israelites entered Canaan some of these 
things must have been already familiar to them, part of 
their use, part of their cult, part of their civilization. 
Others they may have adopted from the Canaanites, for 
it is probable that the settled inhabitants would have 
customs and legends more closely akin to those of Baby j 
Ionia than would the less cultivated nomadic, wander- 
ing Semites. When David set up the cult of the Ark, 
the imageless worship of God, represented only by the 
box containing the two tablets of stone, with the five 
words or commands, at Jerusalem, there must have 
been in existence in Israel liturgies and ritual forms — 
and among them some which had been handed down 



152 Bible and Spade 

from the desert days, in connection with the Ark. 
Indeed we have a record of two such in the book of 
Numbers. But, with the new cult which resulted from 
the establishment of the Ark at his capital as the great 
centre of religious life, David must have, of necessity, 
appointed priests and singers, and organized and de- 
veloped a further especial ritual for this cult. At 
least, such a development began with him. With the 
building of the temple by Solomon the ritual assumed, 
of course, a more elaborate form, but so far, at least, as 
the songs were concerned, people always looked back 
to David as the originator of the Jerusalem ritual. 
Hence the title "of David " of psalms of the Jerusalem 
temple; although I think we may safely trust tradition 
that David was also himself a singer of songs and litur- 
gies. What I mean to suggest to you is that so far from 
our Psalms not being ancient, we must even carry them 
back in rudiment before the time of David. He took 
what he found and improved upon it, developed it, 
and we can trace certain phrases and forms in those 
liturgies back to a time before David. When you see 
as the heading of a Psalm in the Psalter "of David/ ' 
you may recognize this as the hall-mark of the Jerusa- 
lem temple. It means simply a Psalm of the Jeru- 
salem hymnal, which hymnal went back in its origin to 
David, and, as I have already pointed out, in some 
things to a time before David. And this antiquity of 
the Psalms was what we might have expected if we had 
not been obsessed with false notions; for the oldest 
part of religion which has come down to us is the rites 
and the liturgies connected with those rites. 



Hebrew Psalmody 153 

And now I want to confirm what I have derived 
from the old inscriptions from Babylonia, part of 
which I dug out myself in that most ancient and most 
honored of the temples of the olden time, the temple of 
Enlil at Nippur, by material of another sort, for the 
greater part not literary material produced by the 
spade, but material produced by travel, and investiga- 
tion of conditions on the spot. The Psalms are full of 
local color, of local references, which have been over- 
looked, because, I think, travellers have not always 
travelled with the Psalms in mind. My attention was 
first called to these local notes in the Psalms when I 
was travelling back and forth along the river Eu- 
phrates. There come up before my mind, when I think 
of those days, the cliffs that fence in the narrow valley, 
often a couple of hundred feet in height, generally 
glaring white, but sometimes touched with a greenish 
hue or even painted red or yellow. Between these and 
the brown, swirling river are fields of grain or great 
meadows of wild licorice, and close to the water's edge 
grows the flowering tamerisk, ever and anon springing 
up in extensive jungles, the home of countless wild 
pigs, which no pious man may defile himself by eating. 
These jungles are likewise the lair of the dreaded lion, 
and many a night we heaped brush on the fire and kept 
strict guard to protect us from the king of beasts. As 
for the jackals, they were absolutely countless, and 
every night and all night long they wailed by our 
camps with that weird half -human cry that makes you 
think of goblin babies. In the river and along its shores 
the great monitor lizards, so often mistaken for croco- 



154 Bible and Spade 

diles, showed themselves, together with enormous 
turtles and huge antique fish, unknown to our waters. 
With what apprehension we used to see the black goat 
or camel hair tents of the Bedouin Arabs pitched on the 
plateau above the river and stretching, it might be, 
several miles. It always was a question whether we 
should come out without paying blackmail. We were 
equally afraid of the Shammar Arabs of the north, the 
Meshech of Hebrew times, and the Anazeh Arabs of 
the southern shore, the Kedar of Hebrew thought. I 
can see now how the links of the caravan would close 
up and the stragglers hurry forward, and no one felt 
secure until the Arab camp had been left far behind. 
How well I remember being ambushed beyond one of 
these camps. "When I spoke peace, they were for 
war." And then the march — the bitter cold of the 
nights, for we and all caravans must start before dawn; 
and the burning heat of the day before we reached our 
halting place. As soon as the sun was up the heat 
began; as soon as the moon arose it was bitter cold. 
And then the dreariness of the absolutely level plain. 
What a joy it was to see the hills rising before us. In 
marching from Babylonia toward the west the sight 
of the hills meant home, safety, comfort, things to 
which we were used. But all that is pictured in the 
pilgrim Psalms of the Hebrews, 120-134. Each is 
headed, you remember, "Song of degrees," — at least 
that is the heading in the King James Version, — which 
means song of going up, pilgrim song. 

Listen and see how the first of those Psalms tells of 
conditions such as I have described: 








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Hebrew Psalmody 155 

"Lord, deliver me from the lying lip, from the deceitful tongue. 

Arrows of the mighty sharpened, 

With coals of broom; 

Woe is me that I sojourned in Meshech, 

Abode among the tents of Kedar. 

Long time I dwelt with the haters of peace; 

When I would speak peace, they were for battle." 

x\nd it always was a long time. I could travel twice 
as fast or three times as fast as those old pilgrims from 
Babylonia to the feast at Jerusalem, but it took me a 
month or more. 

Or hear this; it makes me think of our guards by 
night, how we would set guards, and how I have wak- 
ened and found every guard sound asleep: 

"May He not suffer thy foot to be moved. 
May he not slumber that keepeth thee. 
Behold ! the keeper of Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep." 

Oh ! how we did long for and need a guard like that ! 

"The Lord is thy keeper, 
The Lord thy shade on thy right hand; 
The sun shall not hurt thee by day, 
Neither the moon by night"; 

when we were scorched by day, and frozen by night. 
Again, from the Psalms this cry: 

"I lift up mine eyes to the hills. 
Whence cometh my help ? 
My help is from the Lord, 
Maker of heaven and earth." 

Those Psalms have been a part of my experience ever 
since, simply because I traversed time and again the 






156 Bible and Spade 

same route that the pilgrims of the Captivity used to 
traverse going up to the feasts at Jerusalem, saw and 
felt everything the same as they did. Naturally my 
conclusion was: those Psalms were written by and for 
the pilgrims from the Captivity to Jerusalem at the 
great feasts — the Captivity, you will remember, was 
the term used by the Jews, not only for those who were 
actually captives in Babylonia during the Exile, but 
for the Jews that remained in Babylonia after the 
Exile for centuries — and this conclusion I arrived at 
not only from personal observation and experience of 
such local references, but also from a study of the 
language of those Psalms in connection with my study 
of the Babylonian language. There are certain pe- 
culiarities in those Psalms which can be explained only 
from Babylonian. Not merely are there certain uses 
of prepositions and the like, which contravene the reg- 
ular use of Hebrew grammar and syntax, but there 
are actually two or three passages which cannot be 
translated from Hebrew, at least intelligibly, but which 
instantly become intelligible when you read them over 
into Babylonian. 

The next thing I noticed in the way of local reference 
was in the 89th Psalm. In the twelfth verse of that 
Psalm occur these words: 

"North and south Thou has created them — 
Tabor and Hermon rejoice in Thy name." 

Clearly that could have been written only by a man 
who had as landmarks of north and south the great 
Mount Hermon, and the conspicuous, but not so lofty 



Hebrew Psalmody 157 

Tabor. Where was that? Up by the sources of the 
Jordan, the site of the ancient temple of Dan. Turn- 
ing to the 42d Psalm, I found that all commentators 
were agreed that this must have been written by some 
one at the source of the Jordan. They were inclined 
to fancy that it was a Levite from Jerusalem, wander- 
ing through that region, or a captive with Nebuchad- 
rezzar's army. Surely a very strange proposition ! 

These Psalms are called Psalms of the Sons of 
Korah. Now the story in the book of Judges of the 
establishment of Dan in that locality tells how the 
children of Dan, moving from their original site at 
the edge of the Philistine plain, as one goes down from 
Jerusalem to Joppa, carried off from the house of an 
Ephraimite his Levitical priest, his images and all his 
paraphernalia of worship, and took them with them to 
Dan, and the story says that this priest was a grandson 
of Moses, and therefore, according to the Levitical 
genealogies, a son of Korah. As one reads further in 
the collections of Psalms of the Sons of Korah, one 
observes, if one is familiar with the country, further 
local references, which apply only to that region. So 
Psalm 46 becomes really intelligible only as one sees in 
it a reflection of the physical conditions of that coun- 
try. Finally I said to myself: "Why, these must 
have been originally a part of the hymnal of the tem- 
ple of Dan"; a conclusion which is supported further 
by the references in those Psalms to Jacob and Israel, 
not Judah, and by the use in them of the regular Israel- 
ite or Samaritan title for God, quite different from the 
Judean title. 



158 Bible and Spade 

The more I read the Psalms, the more I felt that, 
having made two visits to Palestine, I must make still 
a third for the special purpose of camping, as it were, 
on the sacred sites of Israel, and seeing what the Psalms 
meant to me there. Permit me to say that I did not 
start on this investigation with theories ready made. 
In my earlier writings I accepted the theories in vogue 
with regard to the Psalms. It was my investigations 
which upset the theories I had accepted from others, 
and drove me to an absolutely different view, a view 
which ultimately came into complete harmony with 
the results obtained from my study of the Babylonian 
rituals. 

Jerusalem was the great impregnable fortress of Ca- 
naan in the historic period. You will remember how, 
when David desired to annex the Jebusite enclave of 
Jerusalem, which separated Judah from all the rest 
of Israel, the Jebusites laughed at him. They said: 
"Our town is so strong that the blind and lame can 
defend it." It was situated on a hump or swelling of 
a narrow ridge of rock. On the east and on the west 
this descended into deep ravines. Southward it fell 
away more gradually, but in terrace-like ramparts easy 
to defend. Northward, below the hump or swelling, 
was a relatively level narrow ridge, and then rose an- 
other swelling and another. On all sides were points 
from which you could overlook the Jebusite fortress, 
but no point from which with the weapons of those 
days you could dominate it. The only point relatively 
difficult of defense was the north side. That alone had 
to be walled with a very strong high wall. Further- 



Hebrew Psalmody 159 

more, at the foot of the hill on the east was an inter- 
mittent spring, the only living water about Jerusalem. 
The strength of one of those old fortresses depended 
on its abundant supply of water. If it had water 
and there was no other water about, any besieger would 
be defeated by nature. If he could not take the city 
by storm, and Zion could easily be made so strong 
that that was impossible, he would have to withdraw, 
for they had no methods of siege and of maintaining 
an army in those days and in those places such as we 
have now. They only made war during the periods 
when it was not raining. Now this spring at the foot 
of the Jebusite hill, Zion, had been walled in on the 
outside, and a tunnel cut into the rock long before the 
time of David, and a shaft brought up to the surface 
within the wall, so that, while no one could get at the 
fountain from without, the people in the city could 
always have an abundant supply of water. Hence the 
scoff at David. The book of Samuel tells how he of- 
fered a reward, as kings did in those days, of a posi- 
tion in the kingdom almost equal to his own to the 
man who would take that city for him; how Joab found 
where the spring was; how he contrived to get in; how 
he climbed up that " gutter/ 1 as it is called in our 
translations, and took the impregnable city. 

David and Solomon extended the old Jebusite city 
northward to the next swelling or Zion, and on that 
Solomon built his temple. Underneath this were exca- 
vated a vast number of cisterns of enormous size, which 
still contain water, and at some period also, we do 
not know when, water was brought in from distant 



160 Bible and Spade 

sources by underground pipings. By and by the city 
grew over onto the western hill of Jerusalem, and then, 
apparently in Hezekiah's time, a tunnel was cut right 
through that eastern hill, where David's city was, to 
bring the water of the Virgin's well into the valley 
between the two hills. But always it was Zion, either 
the original Zion of David's fortress or the new Zion 
of the temple, that was the central point of strength 
of the city. The other or western hill could not be 
defended in the same way. 1 

I spoke in a former lecture of the way in which Isaiah 
proclaimed the invincibility of the God of Zion. In 
the account of the Assyrian invasion you' see that Sen- 
nacherib could not take the city by storm; and the 
army that he sent against it had to withdraw. That 
was a proof of the mighty strength of Jerusalem; and 
when Sennacherib's army was driven out of the coun- 
try by plague, the final proof was given of the in- 
vincibility of the God of Zion. Now, the Psalms of 
the first book of the Psalter, which was the first Je- 
rusalem hymnal, the first Davidic hymnal, are full of 
the invincibility of this Zion; of God, the Rock, the 
Strength, the Tower, the Fortress, the Refuge; of the 
enemy overrunning the land only to be compelled to 
retire. That Psalter is vivid with this, and the more 
familiar I became with underground Jerusalem, the 
more the city of the old days was brought before my 



1 We gain some idea of the strength of David's city, the Acra 
of the Maccabean time, when we read in Maccabees of the Syrian 
garrison which maintained itself there for twenty years after the 
rest of Jerusalem had been taken by the Jews. 




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Hebrew Psalmody 161 

eyes by study of the excavations, the rock contours and 
the like, the more I realized the local color of those 
Psalms. And not only L When I presented this to 
archaeologists who had an even greater familiarity than 
I with the ancient conditions, who had succeeded in 
restoring and upbuilding in mind the ancient city, 
they responded at once. They felt the local color. 

Well, to make a long story short, Psalms 3-41 are 
clearly from old Jerusalem, before the Exile. The 
Psalms of Asaph, namely 50 and 73-83, and the 
Psalms which we sometimes call the Prayers of David 
son of Jesse, 51-72, have also local color, by which the 
former can be located at Bethel, and the latter at 
Shechem. Ultimately, after the fall of Samaria (721 
B. C), Psalms of the temples of Israel; Shechem, 
Dan, and Bethel were brought to Jerusalem and used 
in the temple there. Some of these were taken over 
almost in the form in which they had existed in the 
shrines of Israel; others were greatly changed, and I 
shall conclude this lecture by giving you one specimen 
of such a change. 1 

The collection which we know as the Psalms of the 
Sons of Korah consists of Psalms 42-49. Those were 
taken over almost unchanged; but there is a supple- 
mentary collection of Korah Psalms, 84-89, which had 
a very different history. In these for the old divine 
name of Israel, Elohim, was substituted the divine 
name of Judah, Yahaweh. In some cases whole 

1 For detailed proof of much above stated about the Psalms, 
too lengthy and too technical for presentation here, I must refer 
the reader to my book The Psalms as Liturgies. 



162 Bible and Spade 

stanzas were remodelled to adapt them for some new 
ritual use in Jerusalem. A good example of all this we 
find in the first Psalm of this collection, 84. Originally 
this was a companion piece to 42-43. Here, as there, 
at the close of each of the three stanzas there was 
a sacrifice, the sacrifice at the close of the last stanza 
being at the high altar. Accordingly the first and sec- 
ond stanzas each have at the end a selah, an indication 
of a great outburst of trumpet-blowing and the like at 
the sacrificial moment, and the first and third end with 
a chorus. The second stanza as we now have it in our 
English translation (and the same is partly true of the 
Hebrew) is quite unintelligible. The translators have 
taken very great liberties with the text, giving words 
meanings which they nowhere possess. Nevertheless, 
they have not been able to make it intelligible, as all 
commentators agree. When I was struggling with 
this stanza in my room in a hotel in Jerusalem, as I 
had struggled with it many times before, and was ut- 
terly in despair, it occurred to me to translate it liter- 
ally. Now, if you will look at verses five and follow- 
ing in the English translation, you will see what it 
was that I encountered. The second half of the fifth 
verse (American Revised) reads: "In whose heart are 
the highways to Sion," "to Sion" being in italics to 
show that it is not in the text. The literal meaning 
of this verse is "Between them the bridge/' or cause- 
way. The next verse reads in the American Revision: 
"Passing through the valley of weeping they make it 
the place of springs." Not so far wrong. Literally it 
is, however: "In the valley of weeping the fountain that 








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Hebrew Psalmody 163 

was made." The second half of that verse is absolutely 
hopeless in the English: "Yea, the early rain covereth 
it with blessings." There is no "Yea," there is no 
word which by any chance can mean "early rain." 
There is no word that means "covereth." It would 
be possible to make out of the last word "blessings." 
The actual reading is this: "The pool the leader encir- 
cleth." The first part of the seventh verse, "They go 
from strength to strength," is literally, "From rampart 
to rampart they go"; and the latter part, which is 
translated, "Every one of them appeareth before God 
in Zion," actually means, "The God of Gods is seen in 
Zion." 

Now, having translated this literally there in Jeru- 
salem, it dawned on me for the first time what it was 
that I had actually before my eyes, rubrics directing 
where the sacrificial procession should go, and, as I 
sat, I saw the whole thing before me from the first 
stanza on. I could locate just the spot on the higher 
western hill, looking down into the courts of the tem- 
ple, across the valley of the Tyropoeon, indicated in 
stanza 1, "How lovely are Thy courts," where the 
sparrow findeth a home, and the swallow maketh a 
nest. Down below and across the valley you still see 
the countless swallows flying, and the sparrows finding 
a home, just as in that day. So I knew where the 
service began, where the first sacrifice was offered, 
looking down to the altar of God and his sanctuary in 
the courts spread out below. From the western hill 
to the eastern hill of Zion ran at this point a causeway 
or bridge, and one can still see the spring of one of the 






164 Bible and Spade 

arches of the ancient bridge of Herod's time. The 
processional started, all clapping their hands and 
stamping their staves, precisely as processionals do to- 
day in Jerusalem, to get the rhythm, singing, "Happy 
he whose strength is in Thee." One such verse will 
suffice for quite a long march. From time to time 
probably voluntaries were added, but this was the 
verse officially provided for this procession. The 
rubric directed the procession to "Cross the cause- 
way between the two hills." When they had done so, 
they came to the road leading down to the right by 
the side of David's city into the valley of weeping, 
the ancient place of burial, just where the rubric 
directs them to go. In Hezekiah's time, as already 
stated, a tunnel was carried under the hill on which 
David's city stood, the hill of Ophel, to bring water 
from the Virgin fountain on the other side into the 
interior of the city, which had now grown across the 
valley of the Tyropoeon and up onto the western hill. 
The point at which the water pours out of that tunnel 
is called to-day "fountain," a word regularly applied 
only to a spring springing up out of the ground. Here 
the water seems to spring out of the ground, and so 
this also is called "fountain," albeit a fountain made 
by man, not by God. The road goes past this foun- 
tain, and so the rubric says: "By the fountain which 
was made." 

Below that is the pool of Siloam,so called in antiquity 
and so called to-day, and for both fountain and pool 
the names actually in use to-day among the Arabic- 
speaking population of Jerusalem are identical in form 




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Hebrew Psalmody 165 

with those used by the Hebrews in antiquity. The 
names have been taken over just as they stood. This 
pool of Siloam does not receive water from the tunnel 
under the rock. The surplusage of that water is car- 
ried out by a rock-cut passage to the east of the pool. 
The pool of Siloam received the surface water from the 
valley. It was quite large, filling most of the bed of the 
valley, and to pass around it you must make a circuit 
to the right. One would have done exactly the same 
thing in the olden time, because there is no other possi- 
bility; so here we have the rubric, "The leader (of the 
procession) encircles the pool." 

That brought the procession to the foot of the 
scarped rock at the southern extremity of the hill of 
Ophel, up which goes the street to the old David's 
city, facing the entrance. The hill rises from scarp to 
scarp, and you can still see the remains of some of the 
fortifications which once made of it such a strong fort- 
ress. Recent excavations have made evident the high- 
est scarp, at the southern end of the citadel, David's 
fortress, immediately above the Virgin's spring. Who- 
ever will make that route will realize the meaning of 
"from rampart to rampart they go." So they come 
to the southern entrance to the temple, even in Herod's 
time the great entrance for the festival processions. 
The arrival at the entrance is indicated by the note: 
"The God of Gods is seen in Zion," and then at the 
temple threshhold the choir bursts out with the cry: 
"Lord, God of Hosts, hear my prayer, hearken, God of 
Jacob," after which appears the selah, indicating the 
sacrificial outbursts with which this stanza closes. 



166 Bible and Spade 

The chorus, by the way, still shows the old Danite 
origin of the Psalm, but the stanza itself, which must 
once have been fitted for a processional to the Dan 
temple, has been eliminated, and these rubrics put in its 
place telling of the route of the processional, and con- 
taining what was needed for a marching song. 

Now the following concluding stanza also becomes 
quite intelligible. It begins with a cry to God to be- 
hold the face of the anointed king, for this was a 
liturgy of the royal sacrifice, and then, as the worship- 
pers throw themselves on their faces on the ground at 
the threshhold of the temple courts, the chorus of 
Levites sings: 

"For better a day in thy courts than an army. 
I had rather be a threshold in God's House 
Than a fortress in the cities of the godless." 

The next verse indicates in a somewhat similar way 
another ritual act as the procession advances toward 
the altar, viz., the purification, which takes place im- 
mediately before the sacrifice : 

"God refuseth no good to those who walk in cleanness." 
Then with the sacrifice comes the final chorus: 

"Lord of hosts, happy he who trusteth in Thee." 



I was a bit inclined to think I had gone mad; that I 
had become a visionary and was seeing things that were 
unreal. I got up and went down and made the pro- 
cession. It was absolutely convincing, and yet why 
had no one ever seen it? How was it possible it had 






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Hebrew Psalmody 167 

been overlooked? I distrusted my conviction. It 
chanced that a distinguished Jewish scholar came to 
call on me. I began to read him the Psalm, telling him 
what I thought I had found. He, an American by 
birth, trained in a German university, an admirable 
scholar of Hebrew, now getting actual and not book 
impressions of Jerusalem, quickly saw the point, so 
that I did not have to recite the whole. Attention 
once called to it, it was so clear that he could chant it 
to me in the correct form. Before his visit was over, 
the most distinguished Jerusalem archaeologist in the 
world, Father Hugues Vincent, of the Dominican 
fathers, came in. We had shared finds before and asked 
one another's counsel. I told him I had something to 
lay before him, took him into my room, handed him 
the Hebrew Bible and proceeded to give him my trans- 
lation and exposition. It was not all needed. It was 
as clear to him as it had before been to my Jewish 
friend, and first of all to me. Afterward I took many 
plainer scholars, but intelligent Bible readers over this 
route, making the processional in full form. I believe 
that every one who tried it was convinced, and when 
he reads that Psalm will always in memory make that 
pilgrimage and see, as he does so, the old temple choir 
and hear the old temple chant. 






THE EXPLORATION OF PALESTINE 

We Americans may boast with some pride that the 
scientific exploration of Palestine was begun by us. 
Professor Edward Robinson of Union Seminary, New 
York, the leading Hebrew scholar of his time in the 
United States, went to Palestine in 1838, with a mis- 
sionary of the American Board, Reverend Eli Smith, 
then stationed at Beirout. Missionaries have ever been 
pioneers in exploration. The Bible scholar by himself 
could never have accomplished such great results. 
Smith had the language, Smith had acquaintance 
with the natives by which he could make arrangements 
for travel and abode. Robinson had the technical 
knowledge. It was a combination of the two that pro- 
duced results. Their equipment was small — a compass, 
a telescope, a thermometer, a measuring tape, and, 
above all, a Bible. Eli Smith talked with the na- 
tives. He could get from them their traditions about 
places, learn the names which they gave to those 
places and pronounce and spell them properly. Robin- 
son's trained intellect saw behind the present forms 
of those names their correspondence with the old 
Hebrew names. His scientific and thorough acquain- 
tance with his Bible helped him in this, and helped him 
also in the understanding of the meaning of such 
traditions as Smith reported. He made a second trip 

168 



The Exploration of Palestine 169 

in 1858 to confirm and enlarge, after some years of 
quiet study at home, his former results, the material 
he had first collected and which he had already in 
part published. The result was his three large volumes 
of Bible Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai, and 
Arabia Petrcea, which are to this day an indispensable 
part of the equipment of every Palestinian scholar. 

It was about midway between Doctor Robinson's 
first and second visits that the United States sent out 
a second modest little expedition. Lieutenent W. T. 
Lynch of the United States Navy was detailed, in 
1848, to explore the Dead Sea, and was given as com- 
panion a geologist, Doctor Anderson. It was a very 
adventurous trip and a very dangerous one. They 
got two little metal boats across to the Sea of Galilee, 
floated down the Jordan in those and in them navigated 
the Dead Sea, the shores of which were occupied by 
as thoroughgoing a set of rascals and cutthroats as 
existed in the world. Lynch was the only Frank for 
many years who went into and came out of the town 
of Kerak, the ancient Kir Hareseth of Moab, on a high 
mountain southeast of the Dead Sea, without paying 
a ransom. Many years later, in 1890, I attempted to 
go to Kerak, but found that if I did so I might be held 
prisoner indefinitely, or until some one ransomed me. 
In fact, when I declined to go under such circumstances, 
the Arabs made an attempt to kidnap me and carry me 
there by main force. Pardon the digression. Lynches 
method of avoiding the ransom was very simple, but 
there were not many men who would have had the 
hardihood and the nerve to plan and carry it through. 



170 Bible and Spade 

He put a revolver at the head of the chief of the town 
and marched him out in front of him ! 

It was the interest aroused by this work, especially 
that of Robinson, which led the English to organize 
in 1865 a Palestine Exploration Fund, and it was able 
to engage in its employ several men who won great 
distinction in later English history, for English sol- 
diers, perhaps more than those of any other country, 
have been Bible enthusiasts, such men as Gordon and 
Kitchener. Other famous names on the list of the 
men whom the Palestine Exploration Fund employed 
are Sir Charles Warren and Sir Charles Wilson. When 
the Fund was organized, the latter of these had just 
completed a survey of Jerusalem as part of a plan for 
bringing water into the city as a gift from Baroness 
Burdett Coutts. Unfortunately, the jealous Turkish 
Government did not permit this to be done, and it re- 
quired at last the world war to bring water from Solo- 
mon's pools and beyond to Jerusalem by underground 
conduits, as it used to be brought in the time of Christ 
and we know not how much earlier. Sir Charles 
Warren was engaged by the Palestine Exploration 
Fund to make excavations following up Wilson's 
work. In those days, when one thought of Palestine, 
one thought of Jerusalem. That was the goal of all 
efforts, and, unfortunately, it is about the most diffi- 
cult place to explore in all the world. That Sir Charles 
Warren was able to make some investigations of the 
temple hill under the ground, and he had to do it under- 
ground, was due to the fact of the peculiar relation in 
which at that time England still stood to Turkey, as a 



The Exploration of Palestine 171 

result of the Crimean War. Even at that, it was a 
difficult and dangerous task, partly because of the 
fanaticism of the people, partly because the work had 
to be done at great depths underground, and in masses 
of debris which were continually slipping and sliding, 
so that even shoring was uncertain. One conduit was 
discovered because the excavators fell down a hole and 
landed in it; the same manner, by the way, in which 
many years later a Greek priest discovered the tomb 
of Mariamne, Herod's wife, outside of Jerusalem to the 
west. 

Until very recently it was impossible to supplement 
Warren's explorations of the temple hill, which gave us 
chiefly a knowledge of the contours of the ground, show- 
ing us that the original valleys of Jerusalem are filled 
up with great masses of debris. So the bottom of the 
retaining walls of the great haram platform, which 
roughly occupies the place of the old temple platform 
of Herod's day, descended in places over a hundred 
feet beneath the present accumulation of ruins and 
rubbish. The Kidron valley, so dear to every lover of 
Jesus, proved to be not only in part buried, but the 
brook which now runs through it, in the rainy season 
only, is many feet eastward of its position in Jesus' 
time. 

Along with these excavations went the survey of 
Palestine, the object of which was to make a complete 
and authoritative map of Palestine on a scale of one 
mile to the inch, combining with it a description of 
all archaeological remains of antiquity above ground. 
This was not completed until 1880. America, which 



172 Bible and Spade 

had commenced the work of exploration, was asked to 
join with England in this survey, and an American 
Palestine Exploration Society was formed, to which 
was assigned eastern Palestine. Unfortunately, through 
bad management and lack of support, in spite of the 
high character and scholarship of some of the men 
employed, the Americans achieved nothing, and our 
society soon went out of existence. Later, the survey 
of eastern Palestine was taken up, partly by the Ger- 
mans, partly by the English, and finally completed 
just before the late war. 

One result of this survey has been the mapping of 
Palestine in a way in which no other country is mapped. 
One can obtain a cast of Pealestine from the Palestine 
Exploration Fund, a huge relief map, giving every de- 
tail of the contour, and the ordinary person for a very 
small price can obtain English and German maps which 
give all the details that in other countries are only to 
be gotten at a very large price and through special 
influence from the Ordnance Department. How valu- 
able this work of mapping was may be shown by the 
fact that it was Sir George Adam Smith's map and his 
Geography of Palestine on the basis of which Allenby 
planned his famous campaign in the late war. Along 
with these wonderful maps, the Palestine Exploration 
Fund published also a number of huge volumes of 
memoirs, giving the names of all places found, equating 
them more accurately than had been done heretofore 
with the names contained in the Bible, locating all 
visible antiquities, giving levels, geological formations, 
watersheds, and more. 



The Exploration of Palestine 173 

To this period belong also certain interesting dis- 
coveries of inscriptions. Inscriptions and figures of 
King Seti I, and his son Ramses II, of the^nineteenth 
Egyptian dynasty, were found in the Hauran, con- 
firming the accounts contained in Egyptian inscrip- 
tions of their conquests and their rule in Palestine. A 
German missionary, Klein, found in 1868, across the 
Jordan, at the ancient Diban of Moab, an inscribed 
stele. The French and the Prussians fell to fighting 
about the right to this. The Arabs thought that it 
must be full of treasure, and by way of getting at that 
built fires against it to make it brittle, and then broke 
it with stones. At last the French acquired possession, 
and it now stands in restored form in the Louvre. 
By good luck Klein had taken a squeeze of the inscrip- 
tion so that that was not altogether destroyed by the 
unamicable quarrels of the Christian nations, combined 
with the greed of the treasure-seeking Moslem Arabs. 
This is the famous Moab stone, the inscription of 
Mesha, king of Moab, shortly after the time of Ahab, 
the oldest inscription of any size in the Phoenician 
alphabet known to exist. Historically it is very valu- 
able as giving us a side light on the relations of Moab 
and Israel, amplifying and confirming the Bible; 
linguistically, as showing that the Moabite and the 
Hebrew languages were practically identical, as we 
might have supposed from the Bible story; and re- 
ligiously, as our only record of the religion of Moab. 
The Moab stone belonged to about the middle of the 
ninth century before Christ. 

It was in 1882 that the first inscription of any size 



174 Bible and Spade 

in the Hebrew language was found, from a date over 
one hundred years later. This discovery was due, not 
to the genius or acumen of archaeologists, but to the 
ubiquitous small boy. A couple of lads had gone into 
the mouth of the tunnel which brought the water from 
the Virgin spring under the hill of Ophel into the in- 
terior of the old city. Fingering around on the walls, 
they found marks, which they reported to Schick, a 
German architect and the engineer of the Jerusalem 
municipality. He examined the tunnel and found 
that there was in fact an inscription there. This is 
the so-called Siloam stone. The inscription was made 
by the workmen who cut the tunnel through the rock 
in Hezekiah's time. 

Perhaps I may be permitted a brief digression to tell 
the further history of this stone. Doctor Cyrus Adler 
was sent by the United States, in preparation for the 
Chicago Exposition of 1893, to arrange for exhibits 
from Turkey. I was at that time in Constantinople, 
engaged in working over our finds from Nippur, and 
my relations with the museum and the archaeological 
authorities of Turkey were friendly and intimate. 
Visiting Jerusalem, Adler was shown in the house of a 
Greek, by the Greek's wife, in the absence of her hus- 
band, certain antiquities, and to his great surprise 
among them was the rock-cut inscription from the 
Siloam tunnel and along with it a facsimile replica of 
the same. The Greek had had the inscription cut out 
of the rock, with the connivance of the authorities, and 
was in negotiation with foreign museums for its sale. 
He intended to make a good job of it, apparently, 



The Exploration of Palestine 175 

by selling replicas to a number of different museums 
as originals, for without having the original stone to 
compare with it would have been almost impossible 
for any museum to discover such a fraud. Doubtless 
the fraud would have been discovered, but only after 
some years, when the various museums ventured each 
to put their illegitimately acquired treasure on exhibi- 
tion. Adler wrote to me in Constantinople, stating 
where the stone was, and suggesting that I use my in- 
fluence to have the imperial authorities issue a per- 
emptory order to the governor of Jerusalem to deliver 
both stones to the museum at Constantinople, the 
original Siloam inscription and also the duplicate. 
Telegraphic orders went to the governor of Jerusalem 
the next day. His Excellency the governor of Jeru- 
salem was shocked at finding that such a wicked thing 
had happened in Jerusalem. The poor Greek, I pre- 
sume, suffered, but the governor certainly did not ob- 
tain his share of the profits. The stone arrived at 
Jerusalem while I was still there, and the director of 
the museum, as a special honor, when the original in- 
scription was unboxed, asked me to select a place for it 
in the museum and to put it in that place with my own 
hands. I did so. It was a pretty heavy job, being all 
that I could do to lift the stone. The story has one 
further sequel. When I was in Jerusalem in 1919-20 
the Zionist authorities, who are anxious to establish in 
Jerusalem a museum which shall contain all antiquities 
from Palestine, asked me, as I had been instrumental 
in placing the Siloam stone in Constantinople, now to 
co-operate in securing its return, that it might be 



176 ~ Bible and Spade 

placed in the new museum in Jerusalem. I under- 
stand that this is to be done. 

One more important inscription was found of the 
New Testament period, and in Greek, by Clermont 
Ganneau, who performed a very valuable work of ex- 
ploration in the employ of the Palestine Exploration 
Fund. In a Mohammedan graveyard in the Moham- 
medan quarter within the walls of Jerusalem, north of 
the haram enclosure, Ganneau found, used as a tomb- 
stone, an inscribed slab. On examination it proved to 
be one of the inscriptions from the low barrier wall 
which had divided the court of the Gentiles from the 
court of the Jews in Herod's temple. It was a notice 
to any Gentile who entered the court of the Jews that 
he did so at the risk of his life, a confirmation of infor- 
mation that had come down to us that no Gentile, even 
though he were a Roman subject, would be protected 
if he entered that enclosure. The Jews under Roman 
rule were permitted to preserve many of their peculiar 
customs, including the sanctity against Gentile con- 
tact of the temple precincts, the supposed violation of 
which by Paul almost resulted in his death and did 
result in his imprisonment in Caesarea and later in 
Rome. 

Another inscription, very recently discovered, as 
a result not of scientific exploration, but almost by acci- 
dent, in some of the various diggings on the hill of 
Ophel, David's old city, without the walls of the haram 
enclosure, tells us that there was at this point, in the 
first Christian century, a synagogue of Libertines, and 
connected with it a hospice for the entertainment of 



The Exploration of Palestine 177 

Libertines visiting Jerusalem for the feasts. This 
proprietary or hereditary synagogue, for such it would 
seem from the inscription to have been, may have been 
the Synagogue of the Libertines referred to in the book 
of Acts. 

Furthermore, on the so-called tomb of James, in the 
valley of the Kidron, there is an inscription in square 
Hebrew characters from which we learn that this tomb 
belonged to one of the priestly families, and it would 
seem, from this inscription, that this and the kindred 
tombs, known as the pillar of Absalom and the tomb of 
Zachariah, must have been in existence in the time of 
Christ, and frequently passed by him on his way up 
and down the Kidron valley to the water gate. These 
are the few inscriptions of any importance which have 
been discovered in Palestine, all of them, as it will be 
observed, the result of accident. Excavations have, 
unfortunately, not been productive of inscriptions. 

Systematic excavation in Palestine began in the year 
1890 when, after a period of quiescence, the Palestine 
Exploration Fund resolved to renew and enlarge its 
activities. Petrie, who had just begun to win his 
laurels in Egypt, was called to examine the mound of 
Tel Hesi, on the edge of the Philistine plain, some 
twenty miles or so back of Gaza. This mound rose 
about 150 feet above the plain at the bend of a stream, 
and sixty feet of this proved to be an accumulation of 
debris of the ancient city of Lachish. Petrie spent but 
a very brief time here, simply scraping down, as it 
were, the mound on its highest and most exposed side, 
but he succeeded from that brief examination in giving 



178 Bible and Spade 

us a pretty good picture of the history of the place, 
and laying the foundations of our later understanding 
of the story of the pottery of Palestine. It must be 
understood that in Palestine, as in Egypt and Greece, 
almost the best record of dates, where there are no 
inscriptions, is obtained from the pottery, and not only 
the best record of date, but of locality also. Explorers 
are able to determine the commercial relations of a town 
by the potsherds found there, pottery carrying in a 
peculiar degree the personal stamp of its makers. Bliss, 
an American, followed Petrie at Lachish and cut out 
a sort of a quarter section of the mound, much as one 
cuts a piece out of a pie, and examined it. We were 
all looking and hoping for the discovery of inscriptions, 
of course. He did, indeed, find one inscribed tablet, 
the first found in Palestinian soil. It proved to be from 
the Egyptian government to the king of Lachish, a 
part of that same correspondence of which the other 
end was found at Tel el-Amarna in Egypt in 1888. 
This record, like those tablets, was written in the cunei- 
form script and the Babylonian language. Bliss's ex- 
cavations showed us that in such a city as Lachish we 
had to deal with a place much older than the Hebrew 
conquest, and to this extent his excavations confirmed 
the Egyptian records from which we had learned al- 
ready that almost all the well-known cities of Palestine 
were in existence as Canaanite cities hundreds of years 
before the Hebrews appeared upon the scene, and that 
places which later became Hebrew shrines and sanctu- 
aries possessed the same character in the Canaanite 
period. The excavations at Lachish were never fin- 



The Exploration of Palestine 179 

ished; only a small piece of the town was excavated and 
then, following the mistaken policy resulting from the 
great desire to explore Jerusalem, Bliss was transferred 
to that city, where he determined the line of some of the 
ancient walls to the south of the present city. 

It was not until 1898 that excavations in excavatable 
sites were again undertaken. And here again the mis- 
take was made of digging a little here and a little there, 
of not undertaking one of the great and promising 
Israelite sites, but selecting rather small and relatively 
unimportant sites, not on true Israelitic territory, but 
in the border-land of the Shephelah, a low line of hills 
between Judea and Philistia. The sites examined were 
the ancient Azekah, Tel es-Safi, which may be the 
Philistine Gath or the Hebrew Libnah, Tel el-Judeideh, 
and the ancient Marissa, the home city of the prophet 
Micah. The results of this work were, on the whole, 
disappointing. They gave us information principally 
about the pre-Israelitic and post-Israelitic inhabitants 
of that territory where the principal excavations were 
conducted. At Marissa, Bliss unearthed a city of the 
Seleucidan period, just reaching but not exploring the 
Hebrew town beneath. 

These excavations set going an immense amount of 
illicit digging. The natives, discovering that there 
was a demand for antiquities, showed a skill in discov- 
ering ancient cemeteries far beyond that of the scien- 
tific explorer. I might add that the great enemy of 
archaeology and of the study of antiquity is the col- 
lector of antiquities, the man who is eager to obtain 
relics for some collection. It is less sinful when the 



180 Bible and Spade 

collection is a museum collection, but the museums 
also have been great sinners against scientific research in 
this matter. It is collectors who tempt the natives to 
violate the laws in searching for and selling antiquities; 
unfortunately, for one antiquity gotten in this way 
means a hundred that are destroyed. Moreover, an 
antiquity so found can never be made to tell its full 
story. To do that one must know its exact provenance, 
where it was found, in connection with what else, and 
the like. I shall never forget the picture of destruc- 
tion which I saw when I visited the site of ancient 
Marissa a year after Bliss's excavations at that place. 
For at least two miles up and down the large valley 
westward of Marissa the ground was honeycombed 
w r ith pits and holes, and similar pits and holes ran up 
the little valleys on both sides of the great valley. 
How many hundreds of graves had been unearthed, 
how many objects had been destroyed, I do not know. 
Doctor Thiersch and I had heard of the discovery at 
this point of some interesting objects by the natives, 
and we had come to investigate. By a peculiar good 
chance, and after much persistence, we were able to 
discover finally, among the tombs which had been 
unearthed and rifled by the natives, some four tombs 
of a remarkable character, unlike anything heretofore 
found in Palestine — the painted tombs of Marissa. 
One of these proved, from the inscriptions which we 
were able to recover, to have been the tomb of the head 
of a colony of Phoenicians planted at that place when 
the Ptolemieb were in control of the country, some- 
where in the neighborhood of 200 B. C. These tombs 




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The Exploration of Palestine 181 

made no great revelations, but they were, neverthe- 
less, an interesting and important discovery, throwing 
light on the political, social, and religious conditions 
of a little-known period, and one of them was, in fact* 
the earliest treatise on natural history heretofore dis- 
covered. They were thought worthy, therefore, of 
being published as one of the memoirs of the Palestine 
Exploration Fund. It was a sad thing that this ceme- 
tery could not have been explored by scientific ex- 
plorers. We shall never know now the story those 
hundreds of graves might have told. 

The next excavation undertaken by the Palestine 
Exploration Fund was at Gezer, a city which the 
Pharaoh gave as dower to his daughter when she mar- 
ried Solomon. Learning by experience, this excava- 
tion was conducted for a longer time and a greater 
portion of the mound was excavated than thereto- 
fore. This work was in charge of Professor Stewart 
MacAlister, who had been Doctor Bliss's assistant in 
his excavations in the Shephelah, and had behind him 
therefore the advantage of experience. I had the 
good fortune to visit Professor MacAlister several 
times while his excavations were in progress. The 
reputation of my good fortune in excavations in Baby- 
lonia had preceded me, enhanced by my good luck in 
helping to find the old cemetery of Marissa and its 
painted tombs, the most striking and picturesque 
discovery, certainly, which had been made in Palestine 
up to that time. The result was that the workmen 
regarded me, to use our phrase, as a mascot. They 
w r ere sure that my coming would bring them in some 



182 Bible and Spade 

way good luck, and they watched my every move. 
This being called to my attention, I took advantage 
of it and asked of Mr. MacAlister a favor. I had 
observed a certain stone projecting from the ground, 
from the character and position of which I was led to 
believe that there was something of great importance 
beneath. Mr. MacAlister had commenced his exca- 
vations in the most methodical, scientific way on the 
outskirts of the town, but at the rate of progress which 
he was making it might be a couple of years before he 
reached this stone. In the meantime money might 
give out, the authorities in England might lose interest 
because of the lack of production of valuable returns, 
or there might be some political catastrophe, and this 
spot would never be excavated. I found in talking 
with Mr. MacAlister that he agreed with me that the 
indications at that place pointed to something very 
important. I urged him to take his men off the out- 
skirts of the town and put them instantly at work at 
that spot. The work could be done as scientifically, 
but perhaps with a little more difficulty, from the 
interior. His father, Professor MacAlister, the eth- 
nologist, of Cambridge, who chanced to be visiting him 
at the same time, seconded my request, and Mr. Mac- 
Alister did as we desired. 

At that point was discovered the most interesting 
and important of all the discoveries at Gezer, the an- 
cient temple with its old mazzeboth, or sacred pillars of 
phallic significance. Among these was a stone which 
had been carried off, apparently, from some shrine 
at Jerusalem or its neighborhood in some raid, or as 



The Exploration of Palestine 183 

the result of some victory, and set up in the shrine at 
Gezer, just as on the Moab stone, of which I spoke a 
moment since, Mesha, king of Moab, tells us that he 
carried off such stones from other sanctuaries and 
erected them in the shrines of his own land. The 
chief stone of the cult, a natural phallus, polished by 
much kissing, was quite small. This had been flanked 
by two other very large stones, until gradually there 
grew up a row of stones, one of them at least stolen 
from another sanctuary. Apparently there had stood 
there also an asherah or wooden pole, such as the He- 
brew Scriptures describe as existing at all Canaanite 
shrines, and until the time of Isaiah certainly at all 
the Hebrew shrines in Palestine. Also there was a 
cave, for caves were almost a necessary concomitant 
of these old shrines. There is one at Jerusalem, un- 
der the Rock. There is one on Mount Gerizzim, 
where the great Samaritan sanctuary stood; and 
they have been found elsewhere. But I may not de- 
lay too long on this. In connection with this sanc- 
tuary were found those pitiful and tragic evidences of 
the truthfulness of the representations of the prophets 
of Israel with regard to the religion of Canaan, the 
remains of little children, first-born sons, who had been 
sacrificed by their parents, as also human foundation 
sacrifices. There were found also abundant evidences 
of that obscene sex cult, the corruption of his wife by 
which made Hosea a prophet, and which is mentioned 
over and over again in the Hebrew Scriptures as the 
great corrupting influence of the Canaanite religion, 
which permeated also the religion of Israel and threat- 



184 Bible and Spade 

ened to bring on Israel the wrath of God and the 
destruction of the state. Everywhere about were the 
unmistakable evidences of this cult in the abundant 
phallic and other sexual emblems and symbols. 

MacAlister's excavation of Gezer enabled us first to 
tell the story of early Canaan. It is to his work that 
we are indebted for our knowledge of Palestine in its 
barbarous state, occupied by a troglodyte, non-Semit- 
ic population, very small in stature, using only stone 
instruments, making rude pottery, like most cave- 
dwellers addicted to drawing pictures on the walls, 
burning their dead, eating pigs. It was not until 
about 2500 B. C. that these were replaced by a Semitic 
stock. It is chiefly through the study of the pottery, 
the Egyptian scarabs, and the few seals, etc., which 
were found that MacAlister was able to restore to 
this extent the history of those times — to show the 
slow development of civilization out of barbarism, 
the relations of Palestine with the outside world, the 
influence of Egypt, the coming in of the Hebrews, 
and of new religious ideas. One of his interesting dis- 
coveries was a rock-cut, sloping tunnel descending to 
a depth of over ninety feet, by which the Gezerites 
procured living water under their city within the forti- 
fications. The remains found at the mouth of the 
tunnel show that this was in use before 2000 B. C. 
At that period Canaanites were doing wonderful work 
in rock-cutting, which was, in reality, part of their 
inheritance from the barbaric peoples that preceded 
them. It was the older troglodytes who began that 
cutting into the rock, first enlarging old caves, then 




Photograph by Mr. Lars Lind, American Colony. Jerusalem. 

Rock-cut pool and secret water passage beneath Gibeon, 
from before the Hebrew conquest of Canaan. 



The Exploration of Palestine 185 

building caves of their own, which has left such a won- 
derful underground world, as yet only half explored, 
beneath the Palestine we see. 

In a former lecture I called attention to the fact 
that the ancient Jerusalem before David's time was 
supplied with water by rock-cut shafts and tunnels 
as Gezer was. On my last visit to Jerusalem, in the 
spring of 1920, my attention was called by Mr. Lars 
Lind of the American colony to the fact that there was 
an interesting rock-cut fountain under the city of 
Gibeon. Exploring that, and swimming across the 
fountain, which I assure you was very cold and un- 
desirable as a swimming-pool, stirring up some two 
feet of mud by sounding for the bottom, and thus 
arousing the wrath of the whole town of Gezer, whdfee 
water-supply we were ruining for the next week, we 
found on the other side of the pool steps cut in the 
rock leading up to a rock-cut tunnel, which had once 
been the means by which the inhabitants of the city 
in time of siege could secure an inexhaustible supply of 
living water. 1 There were evidences there as in Jeru- 
salem of an early and a later tunnel, the earlier one a 
straight shaft, the second one a sloping tunnel with 
steps. But this is an aside. 

Of inscriptions there were found at Gezer only two 
clay tablets of the seventh century B. C, one an 
Assyrian document from the time when an Assyrian 
governor resided in the town; but none of those He- 
brew tablets which we had expected were found here. 

1 As I found later this had already been observed, and a brief 
notice of its existence published by Vincent. 



186 Bibfe and Spade 

After Gezer the Palestine Exploration I\ind exca- 
vated at Ain Shems, the Beth Shemesh, house of the 
Sun, of Israelite times, which was the old sanctuary 
of the tribe of Dan, whose hero was Sampson the Sun- 
man, and whose original god was Shemesh the Sun. 
The Germans and Austrians excavated in part the 
ancient Taanach and the ancient Megiddo on the south 
side of the plain of Esdraelon. In Taanach the Aus- 
trians found some half-dozen clay tablets, of a very 
early pre-Israelitic date, inscribed in the Babylonian 
script and character, part of a much larger archive 
which had been robbed or carried off for some reason, 
only these few by accident being left behind. Here 
too were found evidences of that cruel practice of child 
sacrifice, and of the sexual corruption of the old Ca- 
naanite religion. In Megiddo, the Germans discovered, 
in the house, apparently, of the governor of the town, 
a beautifully inscribed seal, with the symbol of the 
lion and an inscription "Of Shema, servant of Jero- 
boam. " Apparently he was an official of Jeroboam II, 
king of Samaria. Also here were found one or two 
temples of the house type, that is, enclosed buildings, 
one of them containing in the small precisely such 
pillars as we find described in the book of Kings as 
standing before the temple to represent the divine 
power within the great pillars called Jachin and Boaz. 
All other shrines, such as were found at Tel es-Safi and 
Gezer, were out-of-door shrines, such as the Israelites 
themselves had at Bethel and presumably at Dan and 
on Mount Gerizzim by Shechem. Doctor Sellin also 
excavated in Jericho, and later, immediately before 



The Exploration of Palestine 187 

the war, for a brief two weeks he dug in the eastern 
hold of the ancient Shechem. 

The place of all others which I had desired to see 
excavated in Palestine, and which I recommended to 
the Palestine Exploration Fund as from my experience 
in Babylonia seeming to me the most hopeful site, was 
Samaria. This was in part excavated by Harvard 
University. The visible remains at that site are Roman 
and Herodian, and there the excavators found a fine 
basilica, and a great Roman temple, also the remains 
of various cities, one below the other, from the Roman 
period backward to the Hebrew and no further, for 
this is one of the few sites not of great antiquity, not 
antedating the Hebrew conquest, but first occupied 
by the Israelites. Omri, king of Israel, chose this 
place as his capital, and built the first city of Samaria 
on an unoccupied site, we are told in the Bible; and the 
explorers reached a building which seems to have been 
a part of the palace of Omri, above which stood a 
finer palace. This is assumed to have been the palace 
of Ahab, for in it was found an Egyptian vase bearing 
the name of King Osorkon, contemporary with Ahab. 
Here was found also a store of potsherds with letters 
smeared on with paint. Potsherds constituted, you 
must remember, the note-books and the letters and 
the records for common things in the old world, in 
Egypt and Greece. This was our first knowledge of 
their similar use in Palestine. These potsherds con- 
tained the names of persons who had turned in their 
tribute or their rent of oil, wine, and the like, with 
statements of the amount; but the most important 
part of these records is the names they contain. 



188 ~ Bible and Spade 

Besides these there have been a few lesser excava- 
tions of synagogues in Palestine, the finest of which 
was the synagogue at Capernaum, which stood appar- 
ently on the very site, perhaps was a replica, of the 
synagogue built by the Roman centurion and in use 
at the time of Christ. 

In Jerusalem, just before the war, excavations were 
conducted outside of the present walls to the south- 
ward. On the western hill, the one now called Zion, 
the Assumptionist Fathers laid bare a little part of its 
eastern side, so long as their funds held out, finding 
what seems to have been the house of the high priest, 
Caiaphas; also the stair street which led down from the 
top of the hill, where the house was in which Jesus 
ate the Last Supper with his disciples, to the pool of 
Siloam, and the water gate. 

On the eastern hill, ancient Ophel, the German 
archaeologist, Gunkel, conducted some slight excava- 
tions in the first decade of this century. Later Cap- 
tain Parker, an Englishman, conducted more considera- 
ble underground excavations on the eastern side of 
this hill, about the Virgin's spring and northward. By 
the side of these latter excavations southward, through 
the generosity of Rothschild of Paris, excavations 
were also conducted under Jewish auspices, Parker 
and Weil giving the general impression of being in 
great rivalry to find the old royal tombs and the old 
temple treasures. Whatever the cause of these two 
excavations, they have brought to us considerable 
knowledge of the city, enabling us to understand, 
somewhat better than before, the history of that part 




Frank Mountain, an artificial mountain a few miles southeast of 

Bethlehem, built by Herod for his tomb, as the early 

Pharaohs built pyramids. 

Later, a crusading fort, where the Knights Templars made their last stand. 



The Exploration of Palestine 189 

of Jerusalem, and bringing us final confirmation of the 
original site of David's city, of the character of that 
city, and of the place of the Acra of the Maccabean 
period, so long in dispute. In my last lecture I told 
you the story of the 84th Psalm. It would have been 
impossible to have made such a discovery as that 
before the excavations of the Assumptionist Fathers, 
and of Parker and Weil. 

This completes the list of excavations which deserve 
that name in Palestine before the war. With condi- 
tions after the war I will deal at the conclusion of this 
lecture. I have referred to the lesser excavations con- 
ducted in various parts of the country by natives to 
procure material for dealers.. The results of these 
excavations have gone, for the most part, to museums 
and collectors in different parts of the world. They 
consist of pottery, glass, seals, and small objects and 
stone implements. There are also collections in Jeru- 
salem, partly in the hands of dealers, partly in the 
hands of institutions and private persons. The larg- 
est of these collections was one made by the German 
Benedictines before the war. The most scientifically 
arranged is that of the Assumptionist Fathers at Notre 
Dame de France. The White Fathers, who have the 
old crusading Church of Saint Anne, which was given 
to the French after the Crimean War, and who have 
excavated the ancient pool of Bethesda, have a collec- 
tion of especial value for the ordinary Bible reader, 
each object being labelled as illustrating something 
in the Bible. The Palestine Exploration Fund, the 
Municipality, the Dominican Fathers, and the Ameri- 



190 Bible and Spade 

can School also have small collections. Mr. Herbert 
Clark possesses an extraordinary collection of stone 
objects amassed by himself, with some beautiful 
pieces of glass, a few old Philistine double axes, and 
the like; and others have smaller collections. By an 
examination of these the present-day scholar is able 
to obtain in Jerusalem itself a very practical educa- 
tion in the antiquities of the country. 

Palaeolithic stone implements seem to be pretty well 
distributed over the surface everywhere; they have also 
been found in old caves on the Phoenician coast, under 
solid masses of breccia, and would presumably be found 
in some of the caves of Palestine if they were similarly 
explored. This evidences the occupation of the coun- 
try at a very early time by a people in a very rude 
state. But evidently, also, rude stone implements con- 
tinued to be used until a very late date, or these 
Palaeolithic remains would not be found distributed as 
they are over the whole surface of the country. Palaeo- 
lithic implements or even eolithic implements are not 
in themselves evidences of a great antiquity, but 
rather of a low grade of civilization. 

Nowhere in Palestine are those beautiful neolithic 
implements found which are so distinctive a charac- 
teristic of Egypt. The character of the stone imple- 
ments found in Palestine is, in general, an evidence 
of the relatively backward state of that country in 
material civilization in comparison with neighboring 
regions from the earliest times down to the latest. 
Glass, it may be noted also, is very rare in Palestine, 
and the specimens found poor. That is, however, in 



The Exploration of Palestine 191 

part at least, due to religious prejudice on the part of 
the Jews. The best glass found in Palestine is that 
from the tombs of Marissa, which place, as pointed 
out above, was occupied in the Seleucidan period by 
a Phoenician colony. 

I have spoken about our discovery at Marissa of the 
painted tombs. In those we found the first represen- 
tation of the cock in Palestine. This bird did not 
appear there until a relatively late date owing again 
to the religious prejudices of the Jews. It was my 
investigation of the history of this creature, his source, 
his date of introduction in various civilized countries, 
which led me to observe what had theretofore been 
overlooked, that the name of the cock appears once 
in the Old Testament, namely in the book of Proverbs, 
chapter 30, verses 29-31. You will not find the name in 
your English Bibles, however, because the scribes who 
put in shape the text of the Hebrew Bible which has 
come down to us, the so-called Masorah, were offended 
by what seemed to them the indecent allusion in the 
line of this verse referring to the cock and drew a 
line through the verse diagonally from the left upper 
corner downward and across toward the lower right 
corner. The result is that the first line was preserved 
intact, a little less of the second, and so on down to 
the bottom. The cock w r as eliminated, which was the 
intention of the scribes, and the whole verse was made 
quite unintelligible. Fortunately for our scientific 
information the original text has come down to us in 
the so-called versions or translations, by means of 
which it is possible to restore the eliminated part. Be- 



192 Bible and Spade 

cause of his unclean habits the cock had a hard time 
in gaining entrance into the Holy Land, and it is inter- 
esting to note that the first representation of him found 
there was on the border-land, in a Phoenician colony 
in Edomite territory. 

The collections to which I have referred are part of 
the material for the study of underground Palestine, 
and especially underground Jerusalem, which have 
grown up in the latter days. There was nothing of 
the sort in Jerusalem when I first visited it thirty-one 
years ago. I could see nothing then but that which 
was above the ground, and going back to my notes of 
travel and observation at that time I realize how little 
I did see of Palestine, and how imperfect an idea I 
acquired of the old city of Jerusalem and of the old 
country of Palestine and of its inhabitants in compari- 
son with that which I now possess. Every excavation 
for a building site in Jerusalem lays bare ancient re- 
mains and unearths almost inevitably antiquities. 
The scientific excavation and exploration which I have 
described first called attention to this, and pretty soon 
efforts began to be made to collect what was found 
and record what was seen in the course of building 
operations. Architect Schick, to whom I have before 
referred, did an extremely valuable work in this direc- 
tion in Jerusalem. So also did Selah Merrill, who was 
twice American consul, each consulate covering a 
considerable period of years. He was one of the former 
members of the American Palestine Exploration So- 
ciety to whom had been assigned the survey of eastern 
Palestine. Among the French monastic orders also 




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The Exploration of Palestine 193 

were some fathers who developed a particular interest 
in antiquities, Pere Barnabe of the Franciscans, Germer 
Durand of the Assumptionists, LaGrange, Vincent, 
Abel, and others of the Dominicans. The Palestine 
Exploration Fund, and later the similar German so- 
ciety, encouraged study and observation in various 
directions, the collection of folk-lore and folk-songs, 
meteorological observations, customs, and habits, 
village traditions, and the like. Visiting Palestine for 
the second time, twelve years after my first visit, I 
found, as a result of the work which had been going on, 
a vastly different situation. I came away from that 
visit knowing something of Palestine under the ground. 
My last visit, a little over a year ago, showed me a 
very rapid progress in the interval, and I am glad to 
say that we Americans have played an honorable 
part in this development of knowledge of underground 
Palestine, not only through our consul, to whom refer- 
ence was made, but through the American School of 
Archaeological Research, which was established by the 
efforts of the late Professor Thayer of Cambridge, 
Massachusetts, about the commencement of this cen- 
tury, and which has had as its annual directors some 
of the most distinguished Bible scholars of this country. 
One result of all this has been the identification with 
a reasonable degree of certainty of some of the most 
important Biblical sites in Jerusalem, which were be- 
fore uncertain. We now understand pretty well the 
configuration of the temple site, and especially just 
where the great altar stood, namely on that natural 
rock which to this day the Moslems regard as so sacred. 



194 Bible and Spade 

This is enclosed by a beautiful dome or qubbeh, which 
is generally known under the false title of the Mosque 
of Omar, its true title being the Dome of the Rock. I 
think we may now say that the traditional sites of the 
tomb of our Lord and of Golgotha are determined to 
be the true sites. When I first saw the Church of the 
Holy Sepulchre, in 1890, I confess that I was repelled 
by it. I could not imagine how Golgotha and the 
Holy Sepulchre could ever really have been there, and 
fancied that the whole thing was a monastic mediaeval 
myth. When I visited it again in 1902, with a little 
better perception of what was under the surface, a 
little better understanding of the early history of the 
city, I found myself in doubt. I remember comparing 
notes with Pere Vincent, who, as I have already stated, 
is probably the best Jerusalem archaeologist in the 
world. He then felt that while he might wish that 
were the site, he yet was doubtful. There were argu- 
ments pro and con. With ever-increasing knowledge 
of the configuration of underground Jerusalem, on my 
last visit I became convinced that the traditional site 
was indeed the true site, and I found to my great plea- 
sure that Vincent had reached the same conclusion and 
was publishing a large book showing the growth and 
development of the buildings there. 

It is clear from all accounts that in Constantine's 
day a tradition still persisted of the place of the cruci- 
fixion and the place of burial. Now tomb sites are 
easier to identify, I think, than anything else in Pales- 
tine, and it would have been a strange thing if in that 
relatively brief time all tradition of the site of Jesus' 



The Exploration of Palestine 195 

tomb and the place of the crucifixion and the resur- 
rection had vanished. But over the site had accumu- 
lated an immense amount of debris, and the Romans 
had built there a temple of Venus. When this debris 
was removed, in the desire to do honor to and to pre- 
serve Golgotha and the Tomb for Helena's sake and 
for the sake of the great body of her fellow Chris- 
tians, Constantine's architect cut away the slope of 
the hill in which was the tomb of Joseph, where Jesus 
had been buried, so as to leave that tomb isolated, 
standing by itself. In doing this, he did not cut 
away quite all the tombs in that hill slope, however, 
and in the little Syrian chapel behind the Sepulchre 
there still exist one or two old Jewish tombs. Simi- 
larly in order effectively to make Golgotha a part of 
this great memorial he cut off the slopes of that hill, 
destroying altogether its original skull shape, but leav- 
ing intact the summit, and especially that part of the 
hill on which the cross must have stood. Both the 
Tomb and the remaining portion of Golgotha were 
incrusted with fine stones, alike to do them honor and 
to preserve from injury what was left. Recent study 
has made it pretty clear that this traditional Golgotha 
must have been just outside the wall of our Lord's 
lifetime, in a sort of a corner. That is, as we now know 
the contours of the city, the only line in which a wall 
of fortification could have been run, and in point of 
fact we can now trace the line of the wall at this point 
by its moat, largely occupied to-day by cisterns. 

We know also perhaps where the Prsetorium was, 
although that is still disputed. By the Ecce Homo 



y 



196 Bible and Spade 

arch, near the beginning of the Via Dolorosa, stands 
the school and convent of the Sisters of Zion. When 
the builders were excavating for the erection of that 
convent, they found that the Ecce Homo arch which 
spans the street was part of a Roman triumphal arch, 
built presumably in Hadrian's day, close to the gov- 
ernment house or Praetorium. That Prsetorium had 
been built on the site of the older Prsetorium of our 
Lord's day, presumably on its general lines, utilizing 
much of its old pavements, foundations, and material. 
Away down underneath the House of the Sisters of 
Zion was found one of these pavements, which the 
sisters have reverently preserved, a gabbatha, an open 
paved space or court of the government house, very 
likely unchanged since our Lord's time. There, traced 
on the ground by the soldiers, you may find the boards 
for their gambling games. Gethsemane also is ap- 
proximately identified, and the house of the Last 
Supper; and the present visitor to Jerusalem who is 
intelligently informed can pretty well restore a good 
deal of the city of our Lord's time, enough at least to 
make the references in the Gospels thoroughly intelli- 
gible. 

Old Jerusalem was a city of two great hills, divided 
into seven smaller ones, with deep valleys between. 
To-day it looks almost like a plain, but he who has 
followed these excavations, standing on a height, will 
see the traces of the old hills and valleys, and if he has 
used the various maps and casts which are now availa- 
ble, the ordnance surveys and reports, the debris will 
vanish from his sight, and he will see the deep clefts, 



The Exploration of Palestine 197 

the high hills, and the steep streets of our Lord's time, 
and even earlier, to the time of David. 

What is true of Jerusalem is true to some extent of 
the remainder of Palestine. Nazareth was very disap- 
pointing to me in my earlier visits. I used to go, as I 
suppose others did, to the fountain in the town and try 
to imagine Mary drawing water there and the child 
Jesus by her side, but somehow it did not seem natural, 
and on the whole I got little satisfaction out of Naza- 
reth. This time I resolved to go and study it as I had 
been studying Jerusalem. I suppose I should have 
known, but I did not, that that modern fountain, a 
shabby, squalid thing, is a recent Turkish construction 
and no fountain at all. The water is supplied to it by 
iron pipes carried underground. We know now that 
the real fountain was two or three hundred feet up 
the valley, at the foot of the real hill, beneath a great 
mass of debris. There there was a cave, from which 
the water used to issue, the same water which is now 
brought by pipes underground to the fountain which 
you are shown as the fountain from which Mary drew 
her water. Under the Franciscans' buildings you will 
find some excavations, from a study of which and of 
the excavations under the house of the Sisters of 
Saint Joseph, near by, you will be able to understand 
a little better what the old Nazareth was like; for the 
present town, as far as it is not well up on the hill, 
stands fifteen to thirty feet above old Nazareth. One 
thing that pleased me on my last visit was to find that 
we can pretty accurately locate the point where they 
would have thrown Jesus down the rocks. 



198 Bible and Spade 

Of Shechem the same is true. Old Shechem is buried 
deep below the ground. It was only on my last visit 
to Palestine, and then not until I had gone time and 
time again to Shechem, that I learned what and where 
Shechem really was, and came to realize its immense 
importance in early Hebrew story. I may not detain 
you longer with this sort of vague statements of the 
things which we have learned. I have sought to bring 
before your mind the fact that while excavations may 
have seemed to be unsatisfactory in material results, 
and while we have been disappointed in not finding 
ancient Hebrew remains — and, in fact, the Hebrews 
never were a building people and in material civiliza- 
tion they always lingered far behind — nevertheless, 
we have obtained a very large amount of information 
about the Palestine of all periods. We have been able, 
even without inscriptions, to secure a very fair record 
of its history, and the Bible, Old and New Testaments 
alike, has assumed a new meaning in many of its parts 
as a result of modern exploration and study of the 
Holy Land. 

On my first visit to Shechem I was not in a position 
to perceive that the book of Deuteronomy was in its 
origin the law book of Shechem, and that those Psalms 
which we know as the " Prayers of David son of Jesse " 
were the hymn-book of the old temple of Shechem on 
Mount Gerizzim. The 68th Psalm makes this very 
clear by its local allusions, as in the passage looking 
down from the top of Gerizzim to Jacob's well be- 
neath. In verses 26-28 are enumerated the people 
who have gathered at the high altar on Mount Geriz- 



The Exploration of Palestine 199 

zlm for the feast, and first of all the people from the 
well: 

26. " In the congregations they have blessed God, 

The Lord from the well of Israel." 

Shechem itself is the congregation of Gerizzim, the 
centre of Joseph and Israel, down there at the foot of 
the mountain, by the well of Jacob. 

Next we have the southern tribes, coming in pro- 
cession to the festival in central Israel: 

27. " There is little Benjamin bringing them down, 

The princes of Judah their leaders"; 

and finally the tribes from the north: 

"Princes of Zebulun, princes of Naphtali." 

On Mount Gerizzim stood in the old Israelite times the 
temple of which the temple of the Samaritans became 
later the heretical successor. This was not a temple 
with bulls, like those at Dan and Bethel, but a temple 
where the law was set up inscribed on pillars. We 
have the account of this in the twenty-seventh chapter 
of Deuteronomy, but I had failed to see this before, 
because I had not studied these things on the spot 
with eyes opened by the discoveries of recent date. 

Clearly as, in the account of the dedication of Solo- 
mon's temple, I Kings 8, or of David's bringing in 
of the Ark, II Sam. 6, the annual temple festivals in 
commemoration of those events are described in the 
story of those events, so here the temple on Gerizzim 
is described in Deut. 27 under the form of Moses' com- 



200 Bible and Spade 

mandment for its erection. In our Masoretic text 
it is Ebal (v. 4) on which the pillars of the law are 
to be erected. This is quite inconsistent with verse 13, 
and scholars are agreed that the Samaritan Hebrew 
text of verse 4 is the correct text, namely Gerizzim. 
Evidently there was a tendenz change in the Masoretic 
text, directed against the Samaritans. We have a 
similar tendenz change directed against the Christians 
in Isaiah 7 : 14. In this ancient Christian proof text 
our present Hebrew Bibles have, "the young woman" 
instead of "the virgin," as quoted by Saint Matthew 
(1 : 21), supported by the independent authority of 
Saint Luke. The sense of the passage requires virgin, 
which appears in the almost parallel passage, Micah 
4 : 8-10. The Greek and Syriac versions of Isaiah 
both have "the virgin." Saint Matthew, apparently, 
does not quote from the Greek, from which he dif- 
fers in detail, but either from the Hebrew of his day 
or from an Aramaic Targum. The present Targum, 
however, agrees with the Masoretic Hebrew, and Jerome 
found the same Hebrew text which we now have. 
Pretty clearly up to about 150 A. D. the Hebrew text 
read "the virgin," which was later changed, at the ex- 
pense of the sense, to "young woman," out of tendenz 
against the use of the passage by Christians. 1 

In concluding this lecture I wish to say that with 
the abolition of the Turkish Government and the intro- 
duction of British control the great opportunity has 
come for a thorough exploration of the country. Al- 
ready the Palestine Exploration Fund has commenced 

1 C/. Peters, The Old Testament and the New Scholarship. 




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The Exploration of Palestine 201 

the excavation of Ashkelon, the old Philistine city 
on the coast of the Mediterranean. The Jews have 
commenced work at Tiberias; the Dominican Fathers 
are exploring the site of Ain Duk in the Jordan valley, 
near Jericho, where during the war a mosaic floor of an 
interesting Jewish synagogue, perhaps of Herod's time, 
perhaps later, was laid bare by the explosion of a shell. 
The University of Pennsylvania is excavating Beisan, 
the ancient Beth Shean, and Scythopolis. The Univer- 
sity of Chicago has obtained the concession for Me- 
giddo, and Harvard for Samaria. 

I have said that we have not heretofore found much 
of Hebrew remains. Previous excavations have never 
been conducted to a finish. Bliss did a little at Lachish, 
Harvard a little at Samaria; but no excavations were 
completed. The obstacles were too great; and the 
support was too small. Perhaps, too, our knowledge 
was not sufficient. Moreover the sites chosen were 
ordinarily not sites of the greatest importance and 
interest from the point of view of the Bible story. 
They were places on the border-land, and not the true 
homes of the Israelites. Perhaps that is one reason 
why we have not found those Bible remains which 
are what most of us believe to be the most important 
things to be sought for. From what little we have 
yet found it would seem, as I have said, as though the 
Hebrew always stood far behind in material civiliza- 
tion. They were no builders. They left few records 
in the form of inscriptions. The inhabitants of the 
country before their time had done great rock-cutting, 
and had built great cities, which the Hebrews took 



202 Bible and Spade 

possession of. When the Hebrews came in, building 
deteriorated, pottery degenerated. With Herod we 
come to a period of wonderful activity in building. He 
was one of the great builders of the world, who has left 
his remains everywhere in Palestine and in many places 
outside. The Christian Byzantine period, from the 
time of Constantine to the Arabic conquest, was an- 
other period of great cultural activity. The numerous 
mosaics which have been found in Palestine, including 
the great Madeba map, are from this period. With 
the Crusades was inaugurated another period of mag- 
nificent buildings. All these periods need an investi- 
gation which they have not yet received, but the 
period of chief importance for the history of religion 
and civilization is that Israelitic-Jewish period from 
which we have as yet discovered so little. 

The two most available and promising sites for He- 
brew discoveries are Zion and Samaria. David's city, 
on the hill of Ophel, southward of the modern city walls, 
is at present unbuilt, as is part of the western hill op- 
posite across the Tyropoeon valley. These should be 
excavated at once. The present opportunity may else 
be lost. Next to these in importance is Samaria, 
already partly excavated by Harvard. In Samaria 
explorers found Ahab's palace, a well-built structure, in 
which also were discovered, as already stated, some 
records. I think that perhaps if we could thoroughly 
explore Zion and Samaria, perhaps also Gibeon, She- 
chem, Hebron, Dan, and Bethel, we might find our 
present conclusion that the Hebrews left little behind 
them in part, at least, reversed. At all events it is in 



The Exploration of Palestine 203 

such sites that we may hope to find real Hebrew and 
Israelite material, and for us Americans there is now a 
great opportunity to excavate those places, if only the 
money may be provided. We have our American 
School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem as the basis 
of such work. We have scholars already trained under 
whom such work could be skilfully conducted. We 
are persons gratse with the British Government and 
the natives alike. If only we could now find generous 
men and women who, having at heart the promotion 
of the study of the Bible, would give the funds for such 
work, there is almost a certainty that we Americans 
could throw a vastly greater light on the Bible by 
excavation at one or more of the sites named than has 
come from all the work done in Palestine heretofore, 
and as America began the work of exploration in Pales- 
tine, it would certainly be a fit achievement if America 
might carry it to high-water mark. 



VI 

NEW TESTAMENT TIMES 

The New Testament, and especially the book of 
Acts, makes us aware of the great prevalence of magical 
beliefs and practices in the first Christian century, and 
also of the role which the Jews played as magicians, 
a role which continued on until the Middle Ages. Id 
our excavations at Nippur we discovered a Jewish 
settlement from the houses of which we took a large 
number of magical bowls. Our excavations also re- 
vealed from older periods a considerable number of 
Babylonian exorcisms and magical formulae, more of 
which have been found at other places in Babylonia and 
in Ashur-bani-paFs library at Nineveh. From these 
it would appear that the old Sumerians had reduced 
magic to a pseudoscience, and their magical texts in 
the Sumerian tongue, which, like the Latin in the Mid- 
dle Ages, was supposed to be especially efficacious, were 
handed down from generation to generation, occa- 
sionally with a translation attached. The main prin- 
ciples of this magic are the same with which we are 
familiar from the study of magic in other times and 
countries, but here it was reduced to a science. In 
some cases it is hard to say whether a particular text is 
to be regarded as a magical text or as a religious ritual. 
Both proceed somewhat on the same principle, of the 

existence of innumerable demons who find occasion 

204 



New Testament Times 205 

to enter into men's bodies or to obtain control over 
them. This control may be manifested by some form 
of calamity to the man or his possessions, or by bodily 
illness. In either case the demons must be exorcised. 
Now this exorcism may be a white magic or a black 
magic, that is, it may be conducted legitimately by 
priests with church rites, or illegitimately by sorcerers 
with rites of a different character. In the fourth and 
following chapters of the book of Leviticus, we have a 
series of rituals of atonement for evil caused by witting 
or unwitting violations of ritual or moral law. We 
have from the library of Ashur-bani-pal at Nineveh a 
series of tablets called shurpu, a great part of which 
are devoted to the removal by a proper atonement of 
the mamit, that is the ban or calamity which has come 
upon the man because wittingly or unwittingly he has 
broken divine laws. The words for atonement in the 
Assyrian text and the Hebrew Scripture are identical, 
kipper and kuppur, and in fact the whole principle of 
the ritual is identical. The same thing is true of the 
liturgies to accompany the rituals, of which we have a 
number in our book of Psalms. We have also Assyrian 
tablets which tell us what the mamit was, showing the 
causes which brought sickness and calamity on a man, 
and they are practically identical in Assyria and in 
Jerusalem. That being the case, we need not be sur- 
prised if we find the black magic also substantially 
identical. 

It was the systematic form in which this Sumerian 
magic was developed which caused it to influence in a 
peculiar degree the magic of surrounding and related 



206 Bible and Spade 

countries, so that its principles and methods have 
passed down from generation to generation, in fact, 
even to our time. One of the fundamental principles 
of magic as it shows itself in the old Sumerian texts, is 
the power that lies in the knowledge of the name. To 
know the name gives power over or through the being 
which that name expresses. In attacking the power 
of evil, the magician must call to his aid some divine 
authority to support him in his combat. This aid is 
generally known as the Word of Power, and in its sim- 
ple form is the name of some divine being or thing. 
Hear a part of one of the inscriptions found on the 
bowls in the Jewish houses at Nippur, placed as a rule 
under the threshold, the intent of which was to imprison 
evil spirits and hold them beneath the threshold by 
exorcisms, that they might not harm the house or its 
inhabitants. Such bowls properly provided with incan- 
tations by the right sort of magicians should not only 
protect against evil, but also insure all sorts of pros- 
perity to the family within. "A remedy from heaven 
to Darbah, son of Asasarieh, and for Shadkoi, daughter 
of Dada, his wife, for their sons and daughters, their 
houses and possessions; that they may have children, 
and that these live and be preserved from Shedim and 
Daevas, from Shubhte and Satans — from curses, night 
demons and destruction which have been prepared for 
them." Then the charm adjures an angel who is 
"come down from heaven," who has "command in 
the East over the secrets of the Almighty," to preserve 
them. Then follows the ban or curse on all sorts of 
evils, some of them personified by names of demons, 



New Testament Times 207 

some of them mentioned simply as "troubles, cursing, 
laceration, calamity, ban, curse"; and finally this charm 
is made applicable to " their houses and possessions" 
and " everything which may be theirs," and the whole 
ends thus: "By means of this we loosen their hold 
from this day and forever. In the name of Yahaweh 
of Hosts ! Amen ! Amen ! Selah ! May Yahaweh, by 
this, preserve him from every Ashmodai of his soul." 
Here the sorcerer has used the greatest of all names, 
in which he is very orthodox, albeit at that time the 
name Yahaweh was a secret, mystic name for the deity, 
forbidden the ordinary man. We find frequently cu- 
rious compound names used and unintelligible names 
made up to represent extraordinary demons, which by 
the power of black magic are to be made to serve for a 
good purpose, but the sure name, which is above all 
other names, is that mysterious, forbidden name of 
the God of the Jews, Yahaweh. This is the most 
powerful name by which a man may conjure everything 
in heaven and on earth, before which everything must 
bow. This was to the Jews the great Word of Pow r er. 
The Christians transferred this to Jesus Christ as the 
expression of that divine power to which the world of 
spirits is subject. So Saint Paul writes: "At the name 
of Jesus, every knee shall bow, in heaven and on earth 
and under the earth." (Phil. 2 : 10.) So in that early 
Aramaic document which Saint Luke has translated 
or adapted in the first part of the book of Acts, the 
apostles are represented as overcoming all the powers 
of evil spirits possessing men with disease by that 
name (Acts 4: 10): "By the name of Jesus Christ of 



208 Bible and Spade 

Nazareth, doth this man appear before you whole." 
It was by the power of his name that the evil spirit of 
disease was cast out. 

Perhaps the most common form of magic the world 
over is that known as sympathetic. A familiar ex- 
ample of sympathetic magic, of which every one has 
heard, is the melting of a wax figure with the invocation 
of a curse in order to bring evil upon some one. In 
one of the early Psalms we find an indication of a some- 
what similar practice by the enemies of the Israelites 
to bring evil upon Israel, namely the secretion on Is- 
raelite soil of magic figures; and in Bliss's excavations 
at Marissa there were found a number of lead figures 
evidently intended to be used for a similar purpose. 
This principle of sympathetic magic was used freely 
in Sumerian practice in the healing of disease. A pig 
or a kid was placed by or upon the sick person and the 
demon of disease exorcised out of the body of the sick 
man into the animal. Here is an exorcism to be used 
in such cases: "Give the pig in his stead, and give the 
flesh as his flesh, the blood as his blood, and let him 
take it; its heart (which thou hast set on his heart) 
give as his heart, and let him take it." One is re- 
minded strikingly of the devils which went into the 
herd of swine in the country of the Gadarenes, that 
most peculiar miracle of the New Testament, recorded 
in Saint Mark's Gospel, on the authority presumably 
of Saint Peter, and taken over from Saint Mark by 
Saint Luke and Saint Matthew. 

It must be recognized that the early Christians did 
not readily free themselves from these old magical 



New Testament Times 209 

conceptions. Indeed, we know too well that the old 
beliefs in witches and demons and magic continued to 
be regarded as almost an essential part of Christianity 
until our own times, and the most holy things in the 
Christian religion, its sacraments and its creeds, were 
regularly used as magical formulae. MacAlister in 
excavating at Gezer found little magical plates, one of 
them in the form of a bird, made to contain a sacred 
wafer of the Eucharist; and we know from the writings 
of the early Christian fathers, men as great and as 
holy as Saint Basil, how Christians used these. Basil 
tells us that when he first celebrated the communion as 
a priest, he put aside one portion of the wafer to be 
kept through life, that it might go down into the grave 
with him. It was a charm. Baptism was used in 
the same way, as we learn from Tertullian, and possibly 
that mysterious passage in the fifteenth chapter of the 
First Epistle of Saint Paul to the Corinthians (v. 29) : 
"Why are we then baptized for the dead," may refer 
to this same magical use of baptism, which was ulti- 
mately condemned by the Church. 

Here is a curious Christian prayer or magical formu- 
la found on a piece of papyrus in Egypt, now in the 
museum at Gizeh: "I call on Thee, God of the Heavens 
and God of the earth and God of the . . . saints, the 
fulness of the world — who came into the world, and 
has broken the claws of Charon; who came through 
Gabriel into the womb of Mary the Virgin; who was 
born in Bethlehem, and brought up in Nazareth; who 
was crucified — ; through whom the veil of the temple 
was rent; who rose from the dead in the grave on the 



210 Bible and Spade 

third day of death, appeared in Galilee, and ascended 
to the highest of the heavens; and who has upon His 
left myriads of myriads of angel hosts, likewise at his 
right myriads of myriads of angel hosts, who cry out 
with one voice thrice 'Holy, holy is the King of the 
world/ through whose Godhead the heavens were sated; 
who takes His way on the paths of the winds." So far 
you might think this to be some liturgical form of creed, 
and indeed it testifies to the way in which creeds were 
used and sung through all those early days of the 
Church, and shows us how early those creeds really are. 
But the following part is a prayer or incantation ad- 
dressed to Jesus, who has shown his power over all the 
universe, who is "ascended into the seventh heaven," 
"the Blessed Lamb," who has overcome all the enemies 
of man, "through whose blood the souls were freed," 
"who broke the iron bars, who set free those that were 
bound in darkness, who made Charon without seed; 
who bound the rebellious foe," to release him over whom 
this exorcism of prayer is recited from the spirits of 
disease, whether "an unclean spirit or a possession of 
a demon in the midday hours, whether they be ague or 
fever, or fever and ague, or injury from men or powers 
of the adversary, may they not prevail against the 
image, because it was formed from the hand of Thy 
godhead — for Thine is the power — of the world, which 
ruleth forever." 

Egypt has furnished us with innumerable surprises. 
In my former lectures I have tried to show how some 
of those bear on Old Testament story. We have from 
Egypt few texts and inscriptions which we can directly 



New Testament Times 211 

correlate with the Bible, as we can do in the case of 
Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions, but we have, on 
the other hand, an immense amount of material which 
throws a most valuable side-light on whole periods. 
From Egypt novels and stories have come down to 
us, to one or two of which I have made allusion; as 
for instance the story of the fugitive, about 2000 B. C, 
who took refuge in the ancient land of Lot, from which 
we obtain an idea of the general conditions of that 
country some 800 years before the Hebrew conquest. 
I referred also to that travel story of the official who, 
in the time of Judges, went to Palestine, Phoenicia, 
and Cyprus to get wood of Lebanon for his royal mas- 
ter. We have also the story of the Two Brothers, 
which is so strikingly similar in many of its features 
to the story of Joseph, and especially of his tempta- 
tion by Potiphar's wife. We have further a number 
of magical stories, in which a great black magician 
plays a wonderful part, and that same black magician 
we find figuring much later in European tales, the 
stories of Charlemagne's paladins, and of Arthur's 
Knights of the Round Table. I spoke of the four hun- 
dred or so clay tablets found at Amarna, letters from 
the kings and governors of Babylonia, Assyria, Mesopo- 
tamia, Syria, and Palestine, revealing the political 
conditions of hither Asia at the time when the ancestors 
of the Hebrews were beginning to press into Canaan; 
of the discovery of an extraordinary mass of Aramaean 
documents from a Jewish temple at Elephantine, the 
modern Jeb, on the upper Nile, archives of a Jewish 
military colony established there probably as early as 



212 Bible and Spade 

the time of Jeremiah; the letters themselves, however, 
dating from about 400 B. C. They not only throw 
light on the conditions of the colony itself, its unpopu- 
larity among the Egyptians, as the Jews seem always 
to have been unpopular, but also on the attitude of 
the Persian Government toward the foreign religions at 
that period, and on conditions in Palestine at the time 
of Ezra and Nehemiah and Sanballat. Almost revolu- 
tionary in its bearing on our theories of the religious 
developments of the Jews is the evidence those docu- 
ments brought of the temple at Jeb, and the worship 
of Yahu in various temples without prejudice at almost 
the time of Ezra. But most wonderful of all, and most 
important in their results, have been the discoveries 
of papyri, with which we may combine also the dis- 
coveries of the written ostraka or potsherds. 

The first great discovery of papyri was made at 
Oxyrhynchus in 1897, in a rubbish heap of that old 
town in the Fayum in Egypt. Those rubbish heaps 
were full of old books, old records, and old documents 
that had been thrown out. 1 It was as though we of to- 
day were to discover a rubbish heap containing all 
the scraps of paper which some small town had dis- 
carded since the discovery of America. Of course 
they were in a bad condition, many illegible, many 
rotting away, but by wonderful patience and persis- 
tence thousands of them have been detached, unrolled, 
and deciphered. Oxyrhynchus was the first town in 

1 These discoveries were especially the work of Grenfell and 
Hunt, and it is more particularly from the texts discovered and 
published by them that I have drawn. 



New Testament Times 213 

which papyri were found in any numbers, but since 
1897 discoveries have been made in other places also, 
and not only in the towns of the Fayum, but even in 
Alexandria. One of the very amusing and yet very 
important of these discoveries was made, as such dis- 
coveries often are, by a curious chance. You know how 
the Egyptians honored animals, mummified them and 
buried them in cemeteries. There have been found 
cemeteries of crocodiles, cats, monkeys, sacred birds, 
bulls. In digging for inscriptions at one place the 
explorers came across a number of mummified croco- 
diles. One digger, in disgust with his bad luck in bring- 
ing up time after time only crocodiles, which would 
bring him no reward, whereas a little sheet of papy- 
rus would have brought him a present, seized a croco- 
dile that he had dug up and in indignation smashed 
him to pieces. Lo and behold! It was stuffed full 
of papyri. A precious find ! 

These papyri date from two or three centuries B. C. 
onward to the time of the Arabic conquest. They con- 
tain material of every possible description — fragments 
of ancient classical books (indeed, through them we 
have recovered some classics which were lost), frag- 
ments of the Greek Old Testament, of the New Testa- 
ment, of Christian books of which we had never heard 
before, among others unknown Gospels, and collec- 
tions of the sayings of Christ, old church liturgies, 
prayers, some of them very beautiful, magical formulae, 
domestic and family letters, official archives — and I 
might prolong the list indefinitely. The discovery of 
these has revolutionized the study of the New Testa- 



214 Bible and Spade 

ment. It has shown us, to begin with, that the lan- 
guage in which the New Testament was written was 
the common, spoken language of the people of the 
eastern part of the Roman empire by the shores of 
the Mediterranean in the centuries just before and after 
Christ, not a peculiar and corrupt form of old classical 
Greek written by a few ignorant men whose normal 
language was Aramaean, and that it is not to be inter- 
preted on the basis of the old classical Greek grammars 
and dictionaries entirely. I have had to scrap all my 
New Testament grammars and dictionaries, and new 
ones built on the evidence of this great mass of ostraka 
and papyri documents are appearing almost every day. 
This has thrown much light on many passages in the 
New Testament about the exact meaning of which 
there had been dispute. It has done another thing. 
It has given us a method of dating the language of the 
New Testament books which did not exist before. We 
have now a mass of writings covering a number of 
centuries, and by comparison of the New Testament 
writings with the documents from these different cen- 
turies we can reach conclusions as to date which were 
impossible before. In a former lecture I pointed out 
that the tendency of modern New Testament criticism 
had been toward a return to conservatism and to tra- 
ditional dates. That has been in very great part due 
to the discovery of these documents and the study of 
the New Testament in comparison with them. To-day 
most New Testament scholars hold that all the books 
of the New Testament, except perhaps II Peter, must 
be dated in the first Christian century, that is sub- 




Photograph by Prof. W. A. Shelton. 

Enclosing wall of old Temple area in Jerusalem. 

A chance excavation for building purposes revealed this wall to a 

depth of seventy feet. 



New Testament Times 215 

stantially at the time to which they were assigned by 
Christian tradition. 

One argument which has been overdone in both 
Old and New Testament criticism is the argument 
from silence, that is the failure of a document to make 
reference to events occurring, or to religious ideas or 
practices prevailing at the time to which tradition 
assigns that document. There is, of course, a certain 
degree of validity in such an argument, but ordinarily 
its value is small. Probably if you could take the 
family letters or the family archives of your grand- 
parents or great-grandparents who lived at the time 
of the Revolution, which seems to you so stirring a 
period, you would find very little, if anything, about the 
Revolution, no references to Bunker Hill, or Brandy- 
wine, or Saratoga. It you were to take the hymns or 
prayers composed during that period, you would find 
that the hymns did not sing the victories of Washing- 
ton or his defeats, and that the prayers made no allu- 
sion to those events. Out of the great mass of papyri 
from Egypt, it is surprising how few contain any allu- 
sions to important political or even economic conditions 
of the period. There is one from the time of the Jew- 
ish wars, when Vespasian and Titus were crushing the 
Jewish people, which is an exception to that rule, 
and it is such a very human document that I must 
read it to you. This woman's husband has been sent 
to Palestine to take part in some capacity in the Jewish 
war. She writes: "I am constantly sleepless, filled 
night and day with the one anxiety for your safety. 
Only my father's attentions kept my spirits up, and on 



216 Bible and Spade 

New Year's Day I assure you I should have gone to 
bed fasting but that my father came in and compelled 
me to eat. I implore you, therefore, to take care of 
yourself, and not face danger without a guard; but just 
as the strategus here leaves the bulk of the work to 
the magistrate, you do the same." 1 It is as though 
she cast her arms about his neck and hung on him to 
protect him, in her sweet affection making him power- 
less to do his duty, and seeking to make him hold his 
life more precious than his honor. 

From a time when Rome seemed tottering to its 
fall, when the emperor had been captured, when the 
enemy had taken Antioch, not so far away, when you 
would suppose that the bonds of society were being 
loosed and that all would be distress and disaster, a 
certain Allypius, a man of substance, with large lands 
and many tenants, writes to one of these tenants to 
announce a coming visit. By God's will he will come 
on the twenty-third of January. "As soon therefore 
as you receive my letter have the bath well heated, 
ordering logs to be carried for it and collecting chaff 
from every side in order that we may have a hot bath 
this wintry weather; for we have determined to stay 
at your house, since we are going to inspect the other 
establishments also and to regulate the affairs of yours. 
Take care to prepare all other requisites also, above all 
a good pig for our companions; but see that it is a good 
one, not a lean, useless thing like last time." 2 This 

1 H. Idris Bell, " The Historical Value of Greek Papyri "; Jour- 
not of Egyptian Archceology, Oct., 1920. 
2 Ibid. ' 



New Testament Times 217 

would be the nature of your grandparents' letters 
from the Revolutionary period, if you could recover 
them. 

Every-day living under Roman rule must have been 
very much the same in Palestine as in Egypt, and from 
the various documents of these rubbish heaps we can 
reconstruct a most vivid and detailed picture of life 
in Palestine among the common people in such sites 
as Nazareth in the time of Jesus and of the Apostles. 

One problem which the early Christian had to face 
was that of his relation to heathen rites, heathen sacri- 
fices, and heathen temple services, and ultimately, 
beginning in 64 A. D., his relation to the worship of 
the deified Roman emperor, which was the test of his 
loyalty to the state. In the thirteenth chapter of the 
book of Revelation, written, I suppose, in the time of 
Domitian, 81-96 A. D., this worship of the Roman 
emperor is represented under the form of the Monster 
who is Nero returned in the shape of Domitian. Those 
who dwell in the empire are told that they shall make 
an image to this beast and that whosoever will not 
worship the image of the beast shall be killed. All 
must carry (and here we have a word, charagma, which 
from the papyri it now appears was the regular word 
for the Roman seal or stamp) the mark of the Roman 
emperor on the hand or forehead, small and great, 
rich and poor, free and bond, and no man may pursue 
the ordinary avocations of life, buying or selling, unless 
he have that mark. A man did well to have what was 
called a libellus, an affidavit, certified by the Roman 
authorities, which served as a sort of passport to indi- 



218 Bible and Spade 

cate to all men everywhere that he was a true and loyal 
subject. Here is an application for such a libellus, 
found in Oxyrynchus, to be certified in behalf of a 
certain Aurelius by the superintendent of offerings 
and sacrifices, the magistrate entitled to issue such 
documents: "It has ever been my custom to make 
sacrifices and libations to the gods, and now also I 
have, in your presence, in accordance with the command 
poured libations and sacrificed and tasted the offerings 
together with my son Aurelius Dioscorus and my daugh- 
ter, Aurelia Lais. I therefore request you to certify 
to my statement." 

You will remember the questions that arose with 
regard to the heathen sacrifices in Corinth in the early 
days of the Church, with which Saint Paul had to deal; 
and the same questions are dealt with in the Revela- 
tion of Saint John the Divine in the letters to the seven 
churches.' ^ Some said: "After all, the idols are nothing. 
Why should we not eat meat sacrificed to idols?" 
These were the "emancipated." They w^ere poor, and 
it was hard to get meat to eat. Inasmuch as idols 
were nothing, why not go into the temples and eat 
the meat ? So likewise in the time of persecutions there 
were plenty of Christians who were ready to say to 
themselves: "These idols are nothing. Sacrificing to 
the idol of the Emperor is only an empty form. It 
does no harm to me and it will save my life. Why 
should I not do it?" Many of those who sacrificed 
to the gods, did so, not with an actual intention of 
apostasy, but excusing themselves by such sophistical 
reasoning. There were others, and they became quite 



New Testament Times 219 

numerous, so that a special name, libellarii, was created 
for them, who, while they were not willing to sacrifice 
to the idol of the emporor, were quite willing to bribe 
the officials to issue a libellus or certificate that they 
had so sacrificed. Was this libellus found at Oxyrhyn- 
chus a genuine certificate, and does it mean that the 
Christian Aurelius who procured it for himself and 
children really did sacrifice; or did he bribe the superin- 
tendent of offerings and sacrifice to give him a certifi- 
cate that he had sacrificed, when he had not, thus com- 
mitting one sin in order to avoid committing another, 
which he regarded as still more heinous ? We have no 
means of knowing. 

Another question which exercised the early Church, 
as you can see from Saint Paul's letters from Rome, 
the letter to Philemon about his runaway slave Onesi- 
mus, and his words about the attitude of believers 
toward slaves in the Epistle to the Colossians, will show 
you how vital, and how perplexing a question this slave 
question was. Not a few of the fragments of papyri 
found in Egypt have to do with slaves. Here is a 
document asking for the public auction of a two-thirds 
right in a male slave. This slave belonged, originally, 
to a brother and three minor half-brothers. The first 
owned one-third of the slave and the three younger 
brothers jointly the other two-thirds. The older 
brother emancipated his third of the slave. Then the 
guardian of the three minor brothers asked permission 
of the court to auction the remaining third. It seems 
odd to think of a person partly free and partly a slave, 
but it appears from other documents that this was not 



220 Bible and Spade 

unusual in Egypt. We have a certificate of the eman- 
cipation of a third part of a female slave, two-thirds 
of whom had already been emancipated. Here there is 
a suggestion of a little romance. The emancipated 
third had belonged to two brothers, "Achilleus, aged 
about twenty years, of middle height, fair, having a 
long face and a scar on the middle of his forehead," 
and Sarapas, also of " middle height, fair, having a long 
face and a scar on his left. . . ." (By the way, a 
scar somewhere on the body is the usual mark of identi- 
fication in these documents, very much as we use 
finger-prints to-day.) Now these two brothers drew 
up a deed in the street, under the sanction of Zeus, 
Earth and Sun, by which in consideration of a certain 
payment they set free one-third of the slave girl, the 
other two-thirds having already been set free. The 
person who paid the money to set free the last third 
of this slave girl, and here is the possible romance, 
was a certain Heraclas, son of Tryphon, about thirty- 
one years old, also of "middle height, fair, having a 
long face and a scar on his right knee." Even the man 
who certifies the manumission was of " middle height, 
fair, having a long face and a scar upon one of his 
shins." 

It has often been suggested that Saint Luke, the 
physician, was a freedman, and hence his great interest 
in the foreigner, the distressed, and the downtrodden. 
In slave countries physicians were frequently freed- 
men, and that was true even in the Turkish empire of 
the first part of the last century. In Roman times a 
great many professional men, skilled artisans, and 



New Testament Times 221 

others were freedmen who had learned their profession 
as slaves. Here is a document apprenticing a slave 
boy to learn shorthand writing. Two years it would 
require to learn this trade or profession, and 120 silver 
drachmas was the price to be paid for teaching him, 
40 drachmas in advance, 40 drachmas when he has 
mastered the rudiments, forty drachmas when he 
"writes fluently in every respect and reads faultlessly." 
This slave is not to work on feast-days. If, at the 
end of two years he has not learned the art of short- 
hand and it can be shown that the reason is that he 
has failed to work on other days besides the feast-days, 
then he is to continue his study as many days or months 
after the expiration of the two years as he has failed 
to work during those two years; very much the way in 
which we keep boys in after school. 

We obtain very intimate glimpses of domestic and 
family life. Here is a page from a housekeeper's 
day-book of the time when our Lord was a little boy 
in Nazareth, which shows, among others, these items: 

Turnips for pickling. 

Omelets for the bread. 

Perfume for the despatch of the mummy of the daughter of 

Phna. 
Wax and stylus for the children. 
Pure bread for Prima. 
Pure bread for the children. 
Beer for the weaver. 
Leeks for the weaver's breakfast. 
Asparagus for the dinner of Antas when he went to the funeral 

feast of Athe. 
To the slaves for a cabbage for dinner. 



222 Bible and Spade 

Milk for the children. 

To Secundus, a cake for the children. 

On the birthday of Tryphas, for garlands. 

Playthings — for the children. 

Pomegranates for the children. 

Needle and thread. 

A pigeon for the children. 

Perfume for the mummy of the daughter of Pasis. 

On the whole, this gives a very pretty picture of what 
appears to have been a pleasant household life. The 
children play an important part, with their playthings, 
their school material, their cakes, and other dainties, 
and their pure bread and pure milk. Then we see the 
weaver engaged to come in and work for the family, 
and the extra provision made for his beer and break- 
fast. Then we have the proper performance of neigh- 
borly duties and celebration of family festivals. The 
perfume for the mummy corresponds, one may say, 
with the tokens of attention which we give in the shape 
of flowers at funerals and the like; and gifts of garlands 
on birthdays need no comment. 

Rather amusing is a little fragment of another ac- 
count-book of about the same date from which we learn 
what a family had to eat for dinner on three successive 
days: 

For dinner on the 5th, a canopic liver 
For dinner on the 6th, 10 oysters, 1 lettuce 
For dinner on the 7th, two small loaves, one water bird, two 
snipe. 

We even have an invitation to a party which reads 
thus: "The Decurion invites you to his party on the 



New Testament Times 223 

sixth day before the calends, at eight o'clock." Think 
of a party beginning about two o'clock in the afternoon. 
The latest hour at which they began at this time was 
three o'clock. 

There are a few letters which reveal with great frank- 
ness that disregard of human life, especially the life of 
women, which was one of the curses and disgraces of 
the heathen world. The writer, Ilarion, had gone to 
Alexandria. From there he writes back to a woman 
whom he calls "sister," the common way of speaking to 
a wife. With proper parental attention he exhorts her 
to take care of their children. Then he speaks of 
another child whose birth is expected: "If it is a male, 
let it live; if a female, expose it." Such a direction 
should open the eyes of any thinking person to the 
wonderful change which Christianity has effected in 
the condition of women and children. 

You will remember that in his parables Jesus speaks 
of banks in which one might deposit money and re- 
ceive interest as part of the every-day life of his time. 
These papyri documents exhibit an amazingly well- 
developed banking system, letters of credit, exchange, 
and an organization almost comparable to that of our 
own day. We have also interesting notices of distri- 
bution of seeds and the like for the promotion of agri- 
culture. 

The New Testament introduces us frequently to a 
much-despised class, but one much in evidence every- 
where throughout the Roman empire, viz., the Publi- 
cans. We meet with hosts of these in our papyri, 
and especially frequent are they in the papyri from 



224 Bible and Spade 

the villages of the Fayum. The multiplicity of the 
taxes recorded helps us to understand also why the 
tax-gatherer was so hated. We have a poll-tax, all 
sorts of land taxes, and taxes for every conceivable 
industry. There are receipts for the weaving tax, 
the mason tax, and the like. In addition to the taxes 
on land we have a tax on planting, which was levied 
on trees, and on the area of ground under cultivation, 
according to the crop cultivated; taxes on oil, beer, 
and wine; a caravan tax, regulated according to the 
road to be travelled, the number of kinds of animals to 
be used and the loads they were to carry. This was 
especially to equip a constabulary to protect travellers. 
We have a stamp tax on the sale of objects. Here for 
instance is a receipt for the tax on the sale of a cow. 
Here the record of the sale of " a female, mouse-colored 
donkey, shedding its first teeth" for about nine dollars, 
in the value of our money before the war. There are 
taxes for maintaining a watch-tower. Taxes in the 
shape of a day's work for the maintenance of dikes, 
and much more. Monopolies also were sold to Publi- 
cans who farmed them out. A man named Sanesneus, 
aged sixty, having a scar on the left knee, who was 
unable to write, so that he got a certain Castor, scribe 
of the Nome, to draw up a deed, makes a bid for the 
concession for one year of the making and selling of 
buildings in a certain village, with the power to sublet* 
The Publican Heron, son of Heron, farms out a right 
which he has acquired in the same way. We have 
mention of firms of these Publicans, who seem to do 
a large business, and we have also evidence that they 



New Testament Times 225 

were not always incorruptible. In one house were 
found fourteen family letters from a man named 
Gemellus, who directs, among other things, that pres- 
ents be given to certain officials, evidently to secure 
some favor in the matter of remission of taxes. An- 
other man instructs his correspondent to give at once 
a present to so and so, who has just been elected, 
'because we can use him/' We find some evidences 
of graft also in connection with the inspection of temple 
treasuries, which were a part of the state administra- 
tion. One official writes warning another, who is 
evidently a friend or dependent, that the inspector is 
at his place and is shortly coming to the place of this 
other, but he bids him not to be troubled, for he will 
fix it. 

The first Christian century was a wonderful century, 
in many ways strikingly like the century just past, 
a century of enormous scientific progress, a century of 
great unrest, a century of the highest aspirations and 
the most spiritual expressions of religion, and at the 
same time a century of all sorts of fads and supersti- 
tions, of belief and unbelief, strangely mingled one 
with another. Among these papyri are traces, some 
very pathetic, of these superstitions and this religious 
unrest, petitions from those seeking guidance or divine 
favor through oracles, and references to the Evil Eye. 
One lad, who had been seeking counsel from the gods 
in dreams, writes to his father: "I have been deceived 
in the gods, trusting in dreams. AH things are false, 
and your gods with the rest." It was a century of 
wonderful diffusion of education. Writing was ex- 



226 Bible and Spade 

tremely common. Almost every one seems to have 
known how to write or read a little. All happenings 
were jotted down, so that it would seem very likely 
some began to write the life of Jesus immediately after 
the Resurrection. On the other hand, almost every 
one, when he had anything worth while to write, sought 
the assistance of an amanuensis, and we have particu- 
lar evidence from these papyri of the precise manner 
in which Saint Paul, for instance, dictated his letters. 
Further we have learned the character and the size 
of the sheets used for writing on, how many went to a 
roll, etc., so that we are now able to say that in his two 
books in the New Testament, the Gospel and Acts, 
Saint Luke reached the limits of possibility; each is as 
large a volume as one could properly make. 

We have one interesting little piece of school work. 
The Emperor Hadrian in his last days withdrew from 
public life, and from his retirement he wrote to his 
successor a godly letter which was circulated through- 
out the empire as a model of virtue and set as a copy 
for the boys in school. Among these papyri is preserved 
a fair text of this letter from the teacher's hand, with 
a rude copy in the script of a schoolboy learning to 
write. 

But most important for our direct study of the New 
Testament, although these manifold side-lights are of 
the greatest importance in restoring the life and 
thought of that period, are the Gospels and sayings of 
Jesus, which have been found. The first of these 
sayings to be published was discovered in 1897 in 
Oxyrhynchus. There were in that fragment eight 



New Testament Times 227 

words in all, which, according to Grenfell and Hunt's 
translation (with a few emendations from Evelyn 
White's recent work, The Sayings of Jesus), read as 
follows: 

1. Then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote that is in 
thy brother's eye. 1 

2. Jesus saith: Except ye fast to the world, ye shall in no wise 
find the Kingdom of God, and except ye make the Sabbath a 
real Sabbath, ye shall not see the Father. 

3. Jesus saith: I stood in the midst of the world and in the 
flesh was I seen of them, and I find all men drunken and none 
found I athirst among them, and My soul grieveth over the sons 
of men because they are blind in their heart and see not (with 
their understanding). 

4. . . . poverty. 

5. Jesus saith: Wherever there are two, they are not without 
God, and wherever there is one alone, I say I am with him. 
Raise the stone and there thou shalt find Me; cleave the wood 
and there I am. 2 

6. Jesus saith: A prophet is not acceptable in his own country, 
neither does the physician work cures upon them that know 
him. 3 

7. Jesus saith: A city built upon the top of a high hill and es- 
tablished can never fall nor be hid. 4 

8. Jesus saith: Thou hearest with one ear. . . . 

A second series, also of eight, was found in the same 
place six years later. In the following translation 
and restoration of these I differ somewhat from Gren- 
fell and Hunt, and also from Evelyn White: 

1 So closely resembling Luke 6 : 42, that we might venture to 
restore the missing first part from that. Cf. also Matt. 7:5. 

2 Resembling somewhat elusively Matt. 18 : 20. 

8 Much like Luke 4 : 24. Cf. also Matt. 13 : 57; Mark 6 : 4. 
* Resembles Matt. 5 : 14. Cf. also Matt. 7 : 24, 25. 



228 Bible and Spade 

1. Jesus saith: Let not him who seeks cease seeking until he 
find, and when he finds, he shall be astonished; astonished he 
shall reach the Kingdom, and having reached the Kingdom he 
shall find rest. 1 

This saying deals with the attainment of the kingdom 
as a result of unceasing search. The next saying takes 
up the question: " Where is the Kingdom?" 

2. Jesus saith: Ask now the cattle, and they that draw you 
shall say to you, "The Kingdom is in Heaven." Ask the fowls 
of the heaven, and they will say that it is under the earth. Go 
down into the deep and the fishes of the sea will tell you it is 
not there. Verily the Kingdom of Heaven is within you, and 
whosoever knoweth himself shall find it. 2 

That is to say, it is not to be found by observation. 
The search must be turned within. There, within a 
man, is the kingdom of heaven to be found. 

The third saying deals with a question which grows 
out of this: "How is a man to know that he has a 
place in this Kingdom?" 

3. Jesus saith: A man finding the way shall not hesitate to 
make careful inquiry of everything concerning his place (in the 
Kingdom. Ye shall find) that many first shall be last, and the 
last first, and (they shall inherit eternal life). 

The fourth saying is parallel to Matt. 10 : 26, Mark 
4:22, and Luke 12:2: 

4. Jesus saith: Everything that is not before thy face, even 
that which is hidden from thee, shall be revealed to thee. There 

1 Quoted twice by Clement of Alexandria, once as from the 
Gospel according to the Hebrews. 

2 Restored by comparison with Job 11 : 7-9, 12 : 7-9; Ezra 
38 : 20. 



New Testament Times 229 

is nothing hidden which shall not be made plain, and buried which 
shall not be dug up. 

The fifth saying is so broken that one cannot present 
a real translation. The Christians asked Jesus a ques- 
tion with regard to fasting, also praying, the command- 
ments and almsgiving. The answer was presumably 
similar to the second of the sayings in the first collec- 
tion. Of the remaining sayings I do not feel able to 
make an intelligent restoration. 

Along with these sayings were found fragments of a 
papyrus roll of the nature of a Gospel, which Grenfell 
and Hunt restore as follows: 

(Take no thought) from morning until even nor from evening 
until morning, either for your food, what ye shall eat, or for your 
raiment, what ye shall put on. Ye are far better than the lilies 
which grow but spin not. Having one garment, what do ye 
(lack)? Who could add to your stature? He himself will 
give you your garment. His disciples say unto Him: When 
wilt Thou be manifested to us, and when shall we see Thee? 
He saith : When ye shall be stripped and not be ashamed. . . . 
He said, The key of knowledge ye hid; ye entered not in your- 
selves and to them that were entering in ye opened not. 

The passage is curiously familiar and yet different from 
anything that we have. It seems to be in fact, a com- 
bination of various passages or recollections of pas- 
sages. 1 It bears a certain resemblance to a form of ex- 
hortation which used to be more common than it is at 
present and which consists in a combination of texts 
with nothing more added than seems to be necessary 

1 Cf. Matt. 6:25, 27, 28, 31, 33; Luke 11:52, 12:22, 23, 25, 
27, 29-31; John 14:19, 20. 



230 Bible and Spade 

to unite them or to guide the thought supposed to be 
expressed by them in the direction the speaker or writer 
wished. 

The study of these fragments gives us an idea of the 
nature of the collections to which they belong. Their 
singular combination of new and old, of material with 
which we are familiar in our canonical Gospels, with 
slight variations and expansions, and occasional ma- 
terial not from the Gospels at all, but from the Old 
Testament, or from apocalyptical books. It has been 
suggested by New Testament scholars as distinguished 
as Harnack that we have in some of these parts of 
the Gospel of the Egyptians, of which we read in some 
of the early fathers. More recently Evelyn White 
seems to have shown that the sayings are fragments of 
a collection of life-giving sayings from the Gospel ac- 
cording to the Hebrews, a work quoted by Clement 
and others. There was discovered in the decade preced- 
ing, in a cemetery in upper Egypt, a parchment book 
containing the Gospel and a revelation of Saint Peter, 
but those were plainly docetic, writings of that heresy 
which denied the humanity of Jesus and consequently 
made the crucifixion and the death a pretense, a heresy 
which grew out of the excessive contemplation of the 
divinity of the Lord. 

The papyri and potsherds found in Egypt have co- 
operated with inscriptions found in Asia Minor and 
elsewhere to determine certain chronological and his- 
torical questions, and especially to throw light on va- 
rious statements in the Gospel according to Saint Luke 
and the book of the Acts of the Apostles, with regard 



New Testament Times 231 

to censuses, titles of officials, names of persons holding 
office at certain places, and the like. There are a 
number of those in Saint Luke which are not mentioned 
nor confirmed in historical writings and records of the 
period, and on that account Luke was until recently 
charged with fabricating records, and of being no true 
historian. The discovery of various inscriptions and 
records by Sir William Ramsay and others, has shown 
us that in several of these cases Saint Luke had ac- 
curate information. This has led to a rehabilitation 
of Saint Luke as an historian, so that the tendency is in 
the cases which are not yet confirmed to assume that 
Saint Luke is accurate. One of the questions under 
dispute has been Saint Luke's statement of the census 
enrolment caused to be made in Judea by Augustus. 
We now know that Augustus did cause such enrol- 
ments to be made every fourteen years, and while we 
have not absolute evidence of the particular census 
referred to in Luke 2:1, it is generally presumed 
that Saint Luke was accurate in this also, and it is 
interesting to find certain of the details of his account 
of that census supported by the order for a similar 
census issued by the prefect of Egypt. This document 
reads: " Gaius Vibius Maximus, Prefect of Egypt, saith: 
The enrolment by household being at hand, it is 
necessary to notify all who for any cause soever are 
outside their homes, to return to their domestic hearths 
that they may also accomplish the customary dispen- 
sation of enrolment and continue steadfastly in the 
husbandry that belongeth to them." 
In another matter Saint Luke has been abundantly 



232 Bible and Spade 

supported by the evidence of the papyri, namely, his 
statement in the preface to his Gospel that already in 
his time a great number of writers had written records 
of the life of Jesus. Presumably the same reference 
is made by Saint John in the twenty-first chapter, 
where he says that the whole world could not contain 
all the sayings of Jesus if every one were written down. 
It is now clear that almost from the day of Jesus' death 
he began to be written about, and the number of writ- 
ings about him at a somewhat later date is attested by 
John 21 : 25. It is not at all impossible that we have 
recovered in these papyri some of the actual sayings 
of our Lord; but comparison of what has been found 
with what has been handed down in the canonical 
Gospels will, I think, satisfy the ordinary reader that 
however interesting papyri sayings and Gospels may be 
to the curious inquirer, our Gospels have skimmed the 
cream, and we may be well content that the Church 
selected for Bible use those four and only those four. 
The discoveries in Palestine which I recorded in my 
last lecture, and the discoveries in Egypt of which I 
have been speaking to-day, have introduced a new 
realism into the Gospel story which I felt most keenly 
on my last visit to the Holy Land. At Capernaum I 
could picture to myself, from what had been unearthed, 
the beautiful synagogue of stone brought from a dis- 
tance, shining white, unlike the black stone of the 
country, which had been built by the centurion, and 
of which the people of Capernaum were so proud. I 
know now where Capernaum really was, where Beth- 
saida was, where Gennesaret was. I see the scenes as I 






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New Testament Times 233 

read. My mind, when I last visited those places, was 
no longer full of questionings and doubts, as formerly. 
I could give myself wholly to treading in the foot- 
steps of Jesus. 

The Gospel of Saint Mark is the one most vivid with 
the life of that country. He who will read Saint 
Mark, following his narrative up and down in Peter's 
country, will, if he is of a sympathetic nature, find him- 
self walking with Jesus. I think I should call that 
Gospel the " Impressions of Saint Peter." He narrated 
them in the churches in Aramaic, and Mark, a better 
scholar, recorded them in Greek. Now there is a part 
of Saint Mark's Gospel, 6 : 45-8 : 26, which Saint Luke 
did not use. Apparently he did not have it. Saint 
Matthew used it. As I walked up and down that 
country without any prejudgments, in fact without 
any ideas on the matter, I came to realize that those 
chapters could not have been in the " Impressions of 
Saint Peter." They are physically impossible. They 
twist up the line of the narrative. You cannot follow 
from place to place aright, and finally they end where 
they began. Further you will observe that they con- 
tain duplicates, as of walking on the water, and the 
feeding of the multitude. Apparently, later some other 
impressions of Saint Peter from another of his hearers 
were inserted in Saint Mark's original writing. They 
seemed too precious to lose. They were inserted just 
after the feeding in Bethsaida, because they also end 
with a scene in Bethsaida. Matthew, writing later 
than Luke, in Syria or Palestine, had a text with these 
additional recollections inserted, valuable in them- 



234 Bible and Spade 

selves, but which interfere with the line of the narra- 
tive. 

There is one parable in Saint Matthew which always 
used to bother me. It seemed to me contrary to possi- 
bilities, and I thought Saint Matthew must have re- 
ported it wrongly. It is the parable of the vineyard 
leased by the absent owner to husbandmen, who ulti- 
mately seize the vineyard for themselves, refusing to 
pay rent, treating with violence the owner's agents, and 
finally killing his son (21 : 33-42). North of the pres- 
ent walls of Jerusalem, not far from the Tomb of the 
Judges, are remains of some stone buildings which I 
found myself unable to account for. They were not 
houses nor tombs, and they were unlike the usual vine- 
yard towers. At last a Jerusalem friend threw light 
on their origin and purpose, and incidentally also on 
the parable. In the troubled days of the middle of 
the last century the gardens and vineyards hereabouts 
became unsafe. The Jerusalem owners did not dare 
to summer there because of the brigands. So they 
hired men to live there permanently, to protect them, 
that they might be able at least to have the fruits of 
their gardens, if they might not live there. But the 
tenants had to live in houses that were forts, and the 
garden walls became fortifications. Then the tenants, 
recognizing the strength of their position, joined to- 
gether and refused to give the owners of the gardens 
their portion of the produce, and scenes were enacted 
much like those described in our parable. And to-day 
the somewhat doubtful title to these lands goes back 
to those squatting holders. The setting of our Lord's 




House of the wicked husbandmen. 

A small ruin outside the north wall of Jerusalem, whose occupants in the 

last century played the part of the wicked husbandmen in 

Jesus' parable, Matt. 21. 



New Testament Times 235 

parable was historical and notorious facts somewhere 
about Jerusalem in his day of the same character as 
those in this region three-quarters of a century since; 
and those old towers became vivid illustrations of this 
parable recorded by Saint Matthew. 

On my last visit it was a perfect delight to go over 
certain places in Jerusalem, especially to tread the 
stair street of the Assumptionists, probably the very 
steps which Jesus trod, and to see how all fits in with 
the scene of the Gospel narrative. Saint Matthew 
tells us that Jesus told Peter and John to go to the 
fountain of Siloam and find a certain man whom he 
describes merely as so and so. His servant would be 
there to draw water and they were to follow him up 
that stair street to the top of the hill where was the 
house of this unnamed friend, with whom Jesus had 
arranged to eat a sort of pro-passover supper. You 
see from this story in the Synoptic Gospels, how Jesus 
really was at home in Jerusalem, how he must have 
been there earlier in his ministry, as Saint John tells 
us in his Gospel that he was, otherwise he would have 
had no such Jerusalem friends. Saint Mark omitted 
all that early Jerusalem ministry. Peter had not been 
with Jesus on those early visits to Jerusalem. Peter's 
impressions were only concerned with Galilee. And 
Matthew and Luke, following Mark, omitted it also. 
You do, however, find glimpses of that earlier Jerusalem 
ministry of Jesus in Saint Luke, chiefly contained in 
the somewhat inchoate mass of material peculiar to 
the third Gospel which Saint Luke lumps together 
after his account of the Galilean ministry and before 



236 Bible and Spade 

his story of the last Passover and the Passion. Such 
a glimpse we have in the story of the Good Samaritan, 
which could only have been told at Jerusalem. Living 
and wandering in Jerusalem such little touches came 
home to me. 

I spoke in my last lecture of the gambling board of 
the Prsetorium. That brought before my mind most 
vividly the character of those soldiers to whom Jesus 
was turned over by Pilate, for it is the little things like 
that which make things live before you. 

I have spoken already of the Place of the Skull and 
of the Tomb. Let me in conclusion tell something 
which came to me on my last visit, which I think you 
will find very real, and which has never before been 
noticed or published to the best of my knowledge. 
The eye-witness touches here and there in Saint John's 
Gospel have been noticed by many, and especially 
they have been gathered and effectively set forth by 
Doctor Sanday. Against my former prejudgment I 
have been compelled, especially by my last journey to 
the Holy Land, to realize from this eye-witness testi- 
mony, as it were, that Saint John's Gospel was really 
written by an eye-witness, the beloved Apostle. I felt 
that sense of the eye-witness narrative keenly in the 
story of the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well, more 
keenly still at Jerusalem, and the new point to which I 
wish to call your attention is from Jerusalem. You will 
remember that at the close of the fourteenth chapter, 
in that upper room in the house at the top of and be- 
yond that stair street of which I have spoken, Jesus, 
having finished his discourse to his apostles, says: 



New Testament Times 237 

"Arise, let us go hence." The latest commentary 
which I have consulted says that "He evidently did 
not go out, because the discourse continued without 
interruption." 

The following, fifteenth chapter begins: "I am the 
Vine, ye are the branches. 53 Now it has been borne 
home to me from many things that Jesus' parables 
are alive with their surroundings. I spoke a moment 
ago of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Take 
Saint Luke's account in the fourteenth chapter of his 
Gospel of the dinner-party to which Jesus was in- 
vited on the Sabbath, at which he told the story of 
the man that made a great supper and invited many. 
You can follow the acts of the guests and their con- 
versation in that chapter from Jesus' sayings, each 
one of which, including the final parable, is based on 
the acts of the host or his guests, or drawn out by their 
utterances. Apply this principle to the occurrences 
and utterances of that last evening as recorded by 
Saint John. 

It is almost a mile's walk from the house of the Last 
Supper — down the stair street, past the fountain of 
Siloam, out of the water gate, turning to the left up 
the valley of the Kidron, past the priestly tombs, 
under the great mass of the temple — to the Garden of 
Gethsemane. They walked between gardens, where 
just at that time, according to custom, the vines were 
being trimmed, the cuttings from which had been 
thrown into "the street to wither. You have in the 
account of Jesus' discourse on the way one of those 
unconscious eye-witness pictures of the surroundings; 



'•*,. 



238 Bible and Spade 

how, as they walked down that street, they trod on 
these withering vine branches, and saw the vine stocks 
from which they had been cut. It was this which sug- 
gested and from which Jesus took the striking and vivid 
figures for the parable of the vine. 

And farther; as they passed up the Kidron valley, 
and stood beneath that great mass of the temple, 
just before they entered the Garden of Gethsemane, 
"lifting up his eyes," as it says at the beginning of the 
seventeenth chapter, Jesus uttered what every com- 
mentator has called the "High Priest Prayer," the 
prayer which imagines him standing as priest on the 
great day of atonement before the Lord in the inmost 
sanctuary. Who could have invented this; who but 
an eye-witness have reported it? 

I speak as an archaeologist, to whom these objective 
things appeal with telling force because of my practical 
experience. Years ago, when I was excavating Nippur, 
book scholars had fixed the date of the introduction 
of the camel, from the mention of that animal found 
in various writings, at about the close of the third 
pre-Christian millennium. I found inscribed stones at 
Nippur, Ur, and elsewhere which I could not trans- 
port on horses, donkeys, or mules. My men pointed 
out that those were cut for camel burdens. They did 
not need to be told; they needed no proof of written 
records; they knew from their experience in loading 
beasts that we had in each of those stones exactly a 
half load of a camel, and that a camel and only a camel 
could carry those loads. On the basis of that I stated 
with confidence, as an axiom, that the camel was known 



New Testament Times 239 

as a beast of burden at the time those stones were cut 
and the inscriptions put on their faces, some hundreds 
of years before the date theretofore ascribed to the 
camel. I say with equal confidence in regard to that 
parable of the vine and the " High Priest Prayer," that 
the witness which they bear is clear and incontro- 
vertible, of the passage of Jesus with his disciples down 
that stair street between the villas and the gardens, 
up that valley, he talking to them as they walked, until 
at last they entered the garden of Gethsemane where 
he was to be betrayed to death for our sins. And, it 
seems to me clear that he who tells the story was 
present on that night. 



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